About | Arcs.app is a visualisation application that makes it easy to find structure in text and data. Repetitions in that data are visualized by drawing arcs above the repeated regions. Various data types as txt or html are supported. Arcs.app is based on the paper 'Arc Diagrams: Visualizing Structure in Strings' by Martin Wattenberg. He gives definitions on which repititions in a series of characters are actually worth visualizing.
The application parses text or data for repeting patterns, analyses them for maximality, position and such. The results are essential matching pairs and repetition regions that are visualised with arc diagrams.
Arcs.app is a native universal binary for MacOS X. It was implemented in Objective-C and makes use of Apple's Cocoa framework. The application has been developed by me, David Palme for the course Information Visualisation i attended in spring 2007 at the Technical University of Vienna. Feel free to play around with the source code.
Documentation | Arcs.app visualises structure in text or data by drawing arcs above repeted regions in a file or input text. After opening the program decide for an input method: either input some text to be analysed right away or load data from a file. To input text directly just type the text into the text field on the input window under the tab 'Direct Input'. To load data from a file select the tab 'File' and select a file on your computer. Supported filetypes so far are: txt, html and xml.
You can ignore whitespace characters such as blanks or tabs or make the data analysis caseinsensitive by selecting the respective checkboxes in the input window. Also you can ajust the minimal length of a repetition to remove clutter in the visualisation. You will be able to better focus on the essential repetitions then.
Keep in mind this is the first application I developed for the Mac using Objective-C. It is far from beeing final, so treat it more like a beta and have some fun with it.
contact me: david.palme [at] gmail.com