Butterflyzer Alpha 5

When I first thought about turning Butterflyzer into a product, I really had no idea whether people would grok it or not. It seemed to me that if I couldn't at least get that hard-core group of "pioneers" to take a look and find some value in it, it really wasn't worth doing. Now, Butterflyzer has about 75 followers on Twitter, which is getting frighteningly close to 100, the point at which we've said we'd deliver that promised Beta. So what to do now? Why, add a whole bunch of features / potential defects, of course! In this case, these are features that I've been wanting to build in from the beginning, but they've also been driven by the survey feedback we've been getting.
One request had been to provide Butterflyzer as an Eclipse plugin. Done! This means that if you're already using Eclipse you can fully integrate Butterflyzer with the rest of your workbench and workflow. Just head on down to the Eclipse Marketplace and grab yourself a free alpha! (But remember, it is Alpha software and you might end up with that dreaded spinning wheel of death, or worse, so you might not want to keep it in your main production environment just yet.) After installing the plugin, just open the Butterflyzer perspective, create a new general project, create a new Butterflyzer model using the wizard, open it up, and type a search phrase into the toolbar text box. And then see what comes up!
One of the least expected feedback items I've received is that while many people find the graph visualization to be really compelling, a lot of people don't see much obvious value in it -- they often see the real value in the organization and curation capabilities. I do think there is a huge potential for dynamic graph visualization in allowing people to understand deep semantic relationships, but I also am getting the idea that the graphs are not the point -- the information is. Tools like Mylyn / Tasktop have done a great job of putting the graph behind the scene without losing the representational power that the graph structure provides. And that's what this release has been focussed on... - Full Post