So I spent some time over xmas working on my TiddlyTagMindMap plugin on things that I've been meaning to get done for a while. Yesterday I spent an hour working on it so I could show off a few of the features that will be available in the new version (chiefly node meta data). However this hour wasn't creating new features.. it was troubleshooting why it wasn't working in Internet Explorer. Eventually I found the reason - a number was being passed as a string and was fixed by adding one line of code (telling IE to parse the string as an integer). This is not a first this happens all the time and it pains me that we live in a world where lots of people use IE and I have to spend the time doing this so people won't look at web apps I've designed them and see them broken in the IE context.

I put this effort in to fix the bug as it is important that I reach a wide audience with the creations I make. However what pains me is I have to spend time doing this in the work context as do other developers. I've known developers to waste days troubleshooting Internet Explorer issues and it's not even like you have a version of Firebug for this product to make things easy. The money businesses must waste on getting web apps to work in Internet Explorer is criminal yet I see web apps that have been poorly designed that ONLY work in Internet Explorer and I see businesses that encourage their employees to USE Internet Explorer instead of better quality alternatives.

That topic aside I came across a link about Geneology and TiddlyWiki in a colleagues delicious feed (link and it got me thinking about my old family tree that I made many years ago (Robson Family Tree) that I have meaning to "TiddlyWikify" for a while now. This got me thinking about TiddlyTagMindMap and how apart from the visual layout it could be used to display family trees. The annoying thing however is with the library I'm using the emphasis seems to be more on the animations it uses rather than the algorithms that layout the nodes and it got me thinking about creating a new library where you can specify functions for layouts based on child/parent positions. This would initially be just to create a simply flow chart style diagram but later functions for hyperbolic graphs and radial graphs (the visualisation technique used in TiddlyTagMindMap) could be defined and each visualisation technique would be interchangeable. I think this would be essential but require some work :). Will keep you posted..