Home > Archive > Developers/reference > Overview
SpicyNodes is Flash-based display engine that allows users to learn about a topic or search for information in intuitive and organic ways. It utilizes radial mapping to create visual representations of information called nodes.
SpicyNodes’ open API makes interactive radial maps simple to implement. Nodes can contain single words or images, or extensive text and media elements with HTML formatting. Nodes can link to other nodes, nodemaps, URLs, or javascript calls. Thus, SpicyNodes can be a complete visualization environment, or a part of a larger application you are building. A wide variety of visual styles are available.
Community memberships are free. And Enterprise subscriptions have simple and fair pricing for you or your clients.
You can get your first SpicyNodes visualization up and running on the Web in a few short, simple steps. Input your node data into an XML file, set a few basic style parameters, and add a line of HTML code to your web site. The result? Your very own nodemap is out on the Web for all to see. The Developer’s Recipes section walks you through this simple customization, as well as progressively more complex customizations if your SpicyNodes application requires more advanced features. SpicyNodes is also easy to integrate with deployed web-based systems, such as CMS implementations, via the XML interface.
Please browse the links at left, or read any of these recipes:
- Using Custom Graphics for Nodes
- Personalizing Nodes by Editing their Tags
- Using JavaScript for Dynamic Manipulation
- Using Your Own Custom Sounds
- Using Your Own Custom Fonts
- Integrating with Other Sites
SpicyNodes not only presents information, but also illustrates the relationships between nuggets in an interactive, intuitive way. As such, it fills a gap in organizing information that’s existed since humankind’s first efforts at cataloguing.
Designed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, art designers, and programmers, SpicyNodes is, at its core, a platform for generating customized radial layouts of directed acyclic graphs.
The following pages provide a technical view into the challenges of historical and online informational displays, the underlying principles of SpicyNodes, as well as specifics about SpicyNodes’ architecture.
- Opening up new methods of organizing information. Go »
- SpicyNodes fits into a larger picture of how people browse and search for information. Go »
- Learn how SpicyNodes works, including some of the algorithms and principles involved. Go »
- Read about other projects and applications that share our mission of interactive information visualization. Go »
