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Comment by dazbradbury | Hacker News Reader

Really nice work. The drag and drop functionality makes it really fun. However, I'm a little unsure as to the usefulness of the app?

I wrote a 3D run-time object visualiser for object-orientated code whilst at Uni ("Visualising Memory Graphs in Java3D"). It was interesting, and kind of useful for debugging, really good for an overview of your running program's object structure, but not useful enough to be considered successful.

I'm just hoping you can put a well executed app to good use, because the UI is really nice.

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Is this the paper: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/2217/2008_Bradbury%20D.pdf?

I'm looking forward to reading it tonight. I've been experimenting with a module that profiles Django applications and reports on slow or unused methods. Part of the challenge has been coming up with a decent way of presenting the information, and I've been playing with basic graphing APIs.

Has anyone heard of tools that do this? Does it seem like a decent idea?

That's the one! It appears to be a scan though, email me if you want the original. There is an accompanying paper describing the process of obtaining and analysing the memory graph (written by a friend and classmate of mine), if your interested am sure I could dig it out.

Regarding your django profiler, I would take a look at some current profilers to see what the standard is. Am on my phone at the moment so don't have much info at hand, but visual studio does it out of the box, and redgate have a decent tool (these are .Net geared - but the principle is the same). Am sure others exist.

I'm not sure how well 3D memory graphs translate to speed profiling visualization, but I hope you find the paper interesting nevertheless.

Thank you, Darius. I'm not sure about its usefulness as well :). But I'm having fun doing these visualizations - that's for sure.

YouTube visualization helps me to avoid duplicates and watch related videos without accidental repetitions. Amazon visualization - I use it to discover primary resources in a given knowledge domains. And sometimes to find what to read next. So far I never regretted a single book that I read based on this visualization. But I might be preconceived :).

Well, that's clearly the most important thing. When on HN I often go into startup business mode, apologies. Also, it was so polished, I just thought you'd have a long-term plan for it.

I guess finding related items is important for shop fronts, I think you just need a way of engaging them in the first place. I need to think, I'll go to that app to find the product I want. Going to that app, with a product in mind, to find what's related, doesn't seem all that engaging.

My point is, if you could find a reason I'd go to your app first (best reviews/price comparison/something else...), then your visualiser would be an awesome way to up sell further products.

Great project though, keep hacking! And thanks again for sharing your work!

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