I know what y'all mean. As i've used the extension myself I find myself reading a really different type of comments then when i read linearly. It makes it easier to find people have discussions (which are, admittedly, often arguments), and it makes it easier to see when a couple people are just all over the conversation.
The demo page (which is linked above) should transform those loading message into a list of threads you can click into. Would you mind filing a bug over on https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/forum-explorer ?
>It's not particularly easy to use for people without screen readers either.
That's very true. This hasn't really been designed around screen readers, making this type of graph + comment tree interface work accessibly well is a really interesting challenge!
>It's impossible to move the mouse pointer from the left pane to the right without changing the visible comment.
If you click anywhere on the graph then it locks the current comment selection. You can then click to unlock!
I'm trying to figure out if i'm allowed to post it publicly yet, in the mean time shoot me a message (on say twitter @_mcnutt_) and I'll send it to you
> Edit edit: OK, I think I have a basic understanding of what's up. It's overly complex for my needs, though -- I think I prefer the normal comment threads.
that's super reasonable! this is an experimental interface, some things are bound to work for some people and not for others
Unfortunately this work isn't really targeted at mobile devices. It seems to work reasonably well on tablet size device (IMO), but I wasn't really sure how to address phones. I think there was some work in the earlier 00's that tried to use treemaps as a way to explore social graphs on phones that had styluses but I haven't really heard of stuff since then
I've talked to a few people who've had similar ideas! In fact there is a pretty long history of people in visualization/hci communities creating applications like this. There's an extended abstract that goes along with this work that details this history.
I really wish my tooling for spell checking while writing jsx-y code was better, i feel like this happens a lot