Kyle Smith » visualization http://blog.infinitechaos.com No magic here Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:25:38 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Tools for visualizing code http://blog.infinitechaos.com/2009/01/26/tools-for-visualizing-code/ http://blog.infinitechaos.com/2009/01/26/tools-for-visualizing-code/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:00:42 +0000 kyle http://blog.infinitechaos.com/?p=283 When looking through some particularly convoluted code last week I started to wonder if the code was always that complex or if it was a gradual change as several developers attempted to implement the necessary features.

Perforce, which VMware uses for SCM, as well as other SCM systems let you view or check out prior revisions of a file which is helpful, but isn’t all that interesting because you can’t easily compare the files; you end up looking at them one at a time.

Is anyone aware of a tool that will automatically create slideshows or videos of versioned files?  I think it’d be neat to generate a series of snapshots of a file and be able to flip through them and watch the code itself evolve.

This idea was inspired by the code_swarm experiment conducted by Michael Ogawa at UC Davis.  Be sure to follow the link for some cool visualizations of popular open source projects.

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