[SnapPea-planning] priorities

[Nathan Dunfield]

On May 6, 2009, at 4:44 AM, Nathaniel Thurston wrote:
> Wow, that was fast!  It's starting to sound like you're going to do
> (3) without my intervention...

Oh, there's no risk of that.  I just did the easy bit.   As for the  
two remaining issues that I mentioned in my last message:

1) Clicking on a cell in the Dirichlet domain and getting information  
about that cell.

I think this is possible, though I didn't look into it in detail.    
The 3D viewer Sage uses (it's a Java app), called Jmol, comes from  
chemistry, and the standalone version allows you to select atoms and  
measure how far apart they are.  So it can at least relate clicks to  
objects in some way, and presumably one can go from there.

Regardless, there are other, arguably better ways of getting this  
information to the user if this is not possible.  E.g. one could have  
a list of cell equivalence classes, with the information about  
dihedral angles, etc., and when the user clicks a class, it  
highlights in the 3d-view.   Or, and this is probably better, one  
could have a check-box for each class and all classes with a checked  
boxes are highlighted (in different colors, with the connection  
between color and class clear).

2) A link editor.

For this, I think one would need to write a link editor in Java or  
Javascript, and it would then be straight forward to integrate this  
with Sage's notebook.

For instance, some Sage folks are currently working on a similar  
editor for graphs.   You can see the drafter version here:

http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~rkirov2/processing/grapheditor.html

and the discussion about it in the thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/ 
834be3b28bd7919f/01bf6e54a0d1e7af?hl=en&

There's already a primitive (compared to Marc's plink) Java knot  
editor here:

http://www.indiana.edu/~knotinfo/homelinks/knotsketcher.html

	Best,

	Nathan