Visual History Final Report

[Keith Hans]

Hi,

At the end of the exciting SoC 2005, I'm glad to announce the
completion of my Visual History Project. But before going to the
details, I would like to thank KDE and my mentors for giving me this
opportunity to participate this great event. Great thanks to my
mentors David Faure, Michael Brade and Dirk Mueller. Thanks for
mentoring me all these days and giving me courage and directions to go
ahead. Also thank Thiago Macieira and many other KDE people for the
organizing and coordinating work during these days. Now I understand
why KDE is such a success and is glad and proud to go on working with
KDE in the future:) Last but not least thank goes to Google for
initiating and organizing this big event. Many people (including me)
like the idea and enjoyed the work.

Now time for the technical part:
1. Name: Han Dianfei (Official name in Chinese, Keith Hans in English)
2. Contact: keithhans at gmail.com (Originally
handianfei99 at mails.tsinghua.edu.cn, unstable, prone to lose mail)
3. Project: Visual History for Konqueror
4. Mentoring Organization: KDE
(http://developer.kde.org/summerofcode/)
5. Project proposal:
http://developer.kde.org/summerofcode/visualhistory.html
6. Project Source:
http://websvn.kde.org/branches/work/soc-vizhistory/
7. Mentors:
* David Faure
* Michael Brade
* Dirk Mueller
8. Applications License : GPL

The goal of my visual history project is to write a Konqueror plugin
that adds graphical features to visualize browsing history. Though not
all of the original proposed parts are implemented, a substantial
useful portion of this is done and the plugin turns out to be a
sidebar that works with konqueror smoothly.

Key features:
* Presenting history as a graph, with sites as nodes and jumps as edges
* Using animation and color for site of interest
* Capacity to go backwards and forwards in history
* Automatical labeling for hot site
* Tooltip to show browsing statistics of each site
* Double-click on node opens the site in main window
* Layout algorithms to arrange nodes in canvas.
* Deletion and removal of history records.
* Preference settings.

In spite of these accomplishment, there is much to be explored. The
main goal of future work is to make visual history plugin easier to
use and more useful. A TODO list can be found at the source code
directory.

Thanks,
Keith