pebbles - Circular Treemaps Disk Usage Utility

Overview:

I've lately revived my old circular treemaps code and ported it to Java, in order to create a demo of the idea which people can try out more easily. The long-term plan is to create a version of pebbles which itegrates into the KDE.

General information on the history of treemaps are available at Ben Shneiderman's treemap page

For a first impressions of how circular treemaps look like you can check out my old page (or at the screenshots below).

I hope to get the project of porting circular treemaps to the KDE platform, and adding new functionality by leaveraging the powerful KDE libraries, accepted as a Google Summer of Code project. (not selected)

Roadmap:

Feature I want to add after the initial port of pebbles to KDE is done:

• use the KDE MIME-type recognition to show suitable icons in circles for which no preview is available.
• implement mouse-over tooltips showing file details similar to the way Konqueror does it.
• modularize code in order to allow non-file-system backends (e.g. usenet usage, email account usage), and come up with a sample alternate backend.
• optimization of the layout algorithm as such to use better then O(nē) complexity in most cases and a way to bail out if the nē path is being taken too often for a particular node, allowing for hard limits on node count to be removed. - ideally, substituting the algorithm with a O(n*log n) one.

Long-term features and possibilities:

• integration of pebbles as a view plugin for KDE's file manager (and web browser) Konqueror (after KDE 4.0 is released).
• implement drag 'n drop and use KDE libraries to allow modifying operations like moving or deleting files.
• since Qt is strongly OS agnostic by design, and a KDE port to windows and macintosh is in the works (foreseeably within the next 24 months), pebbles could eventually be available on all major platforms, and this transparently from a unified codebase.
• sound-previews: play sound samples for music files on mouse over after a short delay.
• exchange experiences with developers of other Qt-based disk usage visualization tools, such as KDirStat and filelight, e.g. on caching scan results for performance.

Some screenshot of the Java demo which is available for dowload: