Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Taxonomic Browser in Flex

Last week I was playing with the Iphone and I loved its interface. While working for biodiversityatlas.com I wanted to implement some of the UI ideas for the taxonomic browser I am constructing.

The current component lacks of design, effects and a little bit of control on performance, but in general I am satisfied with it so I wanted to publish it here.

The images you see are coming from Google Images. So for every taxon it is displayed a request is sent to Google Api to look for the first image. Curiously we discovered that the results change depending in what country you are. Of course the images are not always correct but it gives a nicer way to help you navigate through higher ranks. For people like me that dont know much about the taxonomic tree it helps to find a Pinus at least!

I havent implemented much functionality when viewing a taxon detail, but this is because BiodiversityAtlas is about distributions, not so much about what data you have available for a taxon, like in the Iphone UI.

In any case this the taxonomic browser I am implementing now in BiodiversityAtlas. So please, if you like it give me some feedback :)

3 comments:

David Remsen said...

I think it's great. Careful with some of the genera names when pulling images off Google. Starting with our own human genus you might find you get more biology that you might hope for :)

Javier de la Torre said...

Thanks! Yeah i have started seeing pictures of people with "taxonomic" names jeje. Would be cool to create a little app where people can "correct" the images that are seen... uhmm maybe something for appengine.

Rovellotti said...

Hi Javier

check out ours ...

http://biodiversitydata.blogspot.com/2008/10/taxobrowser-alpha-is-online.html

I think we should / collaborate/ merge ?