Based on the concept of magnetic interface that I had thought about just after having finished a similar work, this semester project aimed at building MagMap, an innovative blogs browser for the blogs of EPFL. The idea was to give an general overview of the blogs articles posted on a subject, and allow to browse them according to their similarities. The project initially had to give the possibility to find anything on the EPFL website that had anything to do in a given field. This would have allowed for example to find everything that someone had written on a subject that interests you during the last few days, similarly to what offers Google news. Alternatively, you could have found anybody that had the same interests as you. This required to have the possiblity to compute the similarity between you and other students, scientists, etc. based on what they had posted, and find a visual representation that allowed to understand the kind of relations between persons, and articles. We decided for that project to restrict to blogs articles, although the implementation remains general enough to support any kind of data, and to go with the concept of magnet-based interface for the visual representation. This picture shows MagMap running. Do not hesitate to read my report to understand how a magnet-based inteface works!

Alternatively, you can try the java applet. Note that the content that is browsed is not from the EPFL blogs, but from a snapshot of an extract of this blog. This is because the EPFL blogs corpus is big and would require too much time to load.

The application of course relies on a set of similarities that have been computed by Arnaud Lagger. The application does not use any external library to layout and represent the blogs. Although there already exist some, like TouchGraph, they did not satisfy our needs for that project, and it was my work to build such a visualisation and interaction tool. Grégory Dyke worked on the layout algorithm. In fact, the code that implements the magnetic interface has been extracted from MagMap to build a library, MagLib, that you can use in your application if you need a magnetic interface. It was some kind of second project in that semester project: building a library that others could use. It is indeed very easy to use, in the same way as the swing JList, JTree and JTable classes. You can have a look at this sample code that shows the use of MagLib. You can also browse the javadoc or read the appendix of my report to learn more on how using it. I know that this library might not be ready for public use, but I think it is better to release it with a warning than forgetting in on my hard disk. Nevertheless, there should be some updates to it, by the successors of that project.

The applet (Note that it is a beta version, which does not fully implement the concept of magnetic interface!)
The javadoc
The library (Note that it is a beta version, which does not fully implement the concept of magnetic interface!)
The report