Came across this really awesome open source project today. It's called codeswarm, and it's a visualizer for the changes on a project's codebase. What exactly does that mean? Well, it essentially looks at all the changes to a project a team has made (via their source control repository) and makes a video representing it. People show up as names, and the files that are changed are glowing dots that fly from person to person. Taken from his site:
I've been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people -- the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication. My investigations have always been visual: I've built applications that create pictures of what is happening within software projects. But they have always had a rigid structure to them. Organic information visualization, coined by Ben Fry, is a different approach to information visualization. It eschews traditional data confinement in space and lets the elements play together in freeform and unpredictable ways.
For an example of it in action, check out this video representing the Twitter codebase:
Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.
Totally awesome :)
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