Features to Come

    So I've gotten the first draft of the release notes up. I hope they'll suffice. It took a lot longer to do than I originally had planned due to testing and documentation. I'm pretty picky on documentation and trying to rename variables/functions to make everything more understandable. 
    The testing process mostly found errors where I had variable names changed. The frustrating bugs came from boundary cases and specific series of events that had to occur which would lead to an error or a site not getting logged. One example is that having multiple tabs open prior to turning logging on causes problems since those sites didn't get logged (no Load event occured to log the url) and thus would create unbounded non-root nodes. In order to solve these I had to add multiple if-else statements to make sure that each property required to successfully log the URL was present. This is extremely hard to do in the case of the user opening pages that get loaded in background tabs, through "open in new tab". The problem arises from the fact that background loading does not trigger any progress or event listeners, so I have no reliable way to log the site. For now I have it set on a timer of 500 milliseconds - it just needs to load the URL so that it does not default to 'about:blank'. However this does not always work. I could possibly change how the "open in new tab" function works, by automatically switching focus to the newly opened tab, but users may not like an extension altering default Firefox functionality. I at least have a backup safeguard so that the extension dosen't break. Whenever a tab is selected if, if the URL has not already been logged it gets entered into the database, but as a root node. This does not accurately re-create the user's browsing session, but it keeps things stable.
    Lately I've been reading some textbooks in my free time, the most recent one being "Artifical Intelligence and Software Engineering - Understanding the Promise of the Future". After reading the first couple chapters - a general overview of Software Engineering ideas - I've realized that I tend to follow a Run-Understand-Debug-Edit style of development. I find it is easier to keep a mental model of the program when I do incremental development of this sort. The result is that the program generally works (with the exception of a few unconsidered boundry cases) but is also messy. For example, the main procedure for logging websites currently has many bits and pieces and messy subroutines, since over time I have slowly widen the scope of what it can do. It works, but it's messy. I plan on taking a couple days to flush it out - to read over all the pieces and try to organize it to flow logically. My hope is that this will increase efficiency, reduce line-count, and prevent future bugs.
    I've finished with the basics, so now I have a few options on what to tackle next. Not all options are needed, and it really depends on what would be the most useful feature to have:
    1) Thumbnails
        I've had some problems early on with attempting to use thumbnails, but now that I have more experience with Javascript and Firefox I may be able to figure out some way to make the nodes thumbnails. 
    2) Relevant ordering of nodes
        Right now the layout of the graph has no significantly, it just uses magnetic and spring forces to spread the nodes out as evenly as possible. I could add a new layout type to list everything in chronological order, or a way to display only one specific website and all sites that came from it or linked to it. The graph could be filtered by site, so that a scientist could only see papers from one specific domain, for example.  
    3) Graph manipulation
        More features for users to edit the graph: New Edge, Delete Edge, Collapse Node, anything. These functions would be designed to present a clearer and more fluid graph for not only personal reference but sharing with others as well. 
    4) Significance of a node
        It was suggested two weeks ago, when I did my demo to the grad students, that I add a feature to show how significant or important a website is. I could do this by logging the length of time that was spent on each site, and then alter the size of the node to relate to how long was spent viewing. This would be more useful for the casual user than for a scientist, because the length of time spent on a website for a scientist could, most likely, correlate to the length of the article or paper being read. However, it is still an interesting idea and provides more information about the browsing session to the user at a single glance.