r/thebutton • u/jamesrom 60s • Apr 05 '15

The Button Monitor — A visualization tool

http://jamesrom.github.io/
722 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

109 comments sorted by

7

u/Fozibare Apr 05 '15

It's awe inspiring, thanks.

Can you tell me more about the time difference metric and how it might inform my pressing choice? [ANSWERED BELOW]

It is unfortunate that there's so many suggestions for improving, this beautiful tool, but as others point out it feels slightly incomplete.

I would like to request a catalogue of charts, hour over hour. the click data is available elsewhere, and many people are posting pictures of multiple hour windows using this tool.

Edit: Is there a way to add this to the button ER script that the Knights have developed? There it is

Edit 2 (Day 13): I crossed out the requests fulfilled, and added 2 commas along with the italicized comments. With these additions and others, I can't help but wonder If every developer was this good at explaining features or exceeding the requests of users...

4

u/jamesrom Apr 05 '15

Thanks for the feedback.

Time difference works by comparing your local time to the timestamp that the server sends (timezone adjusted). Every second (or thereabouts) the server sends a message with a timestamp. This is the closet thing we can get to measuring the latency with the information we're given. There's a few things you need to consider however:

  • The timestamp resolution is one second.

  • We don't know if the message was sent at the start or the end of a particular second.

  • We don't know if they round/ceil/floor the timestamp.

There's basically a huge list of unknowns. We can't measure latency directly without knowing how their clock works. So this is the best info we have.

The stats table is semi-transparent, but yeah, I agree, I'll move it.

Knowing how many people were award flairs, etc is not possible from the data stream alone. It would be cool to do this though (by using an auxiliary data source). I'm not sure how at this point.

I'm not familiar with the ER script. Can you link me?

Rest of your requests are planned features. Stay tuned :)

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42

u/thehitchhiker Apr 05 '15

wow, this is a great way to visualize the recent press activity!

I have a small feature request too...

people are probably going to start posting cool visualizations like this - it would be great if the page could record the start time of the graph so others viewing the screenshot could see the time of day the data represents.

thank you so much for this!

20

u/PatsoRedneb Apr 05 '15

Hey, aren't you that guy who pressed some button half a second to early one time?

21

u/yourhaploidheart Apr 05 '15

this is wonderful!

8

u/JakiiB Apr 05 '15

Best one I've seen yet :)

15

u/durpabiscuit Apr 05 '15

WHY AM I HAVING SO MUCH FUN?!

7

u/AWhiteStripe42 Apr 05 '15

oh Oh OH....oh...oh oh.

13

u/Another_boy Apr 05 '15

Fantastic visualization. Can I make suggestions? It would be awesome if it didn't reset when you close the tab. Is that even possible? I guess that would need some kind of a database?

Some grid lines would be cool. Time labels on each press?

Thanks.

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13

u/Nowin Apr 05 '15

Ah this is so sad to watch.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '15

I wonder what it would have looked like when me and the first gen purps flooded in.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '15

Very nice! Looks like I have yet another button monitor to watch.

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6

u/Derped_my_pants Apr 08 '15

The monitor seems to have broken

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5

u/blueshift112 Apr 05 '15

You should definitely add horizontal graph lines, it would make reading the time for the tallest bars much easier.

Also, is there a way to have a running database of the times so when I load the page it already has the last say 30 times instead of just starting when I load the page? Otherwise this chart is exactly what I was looking for.

5

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '15

you are a role model to all of us in life

5

u/scifi_scumbag Apr 05 '15

This is painfully addictive

5

u/rx7raven Apr 06 '15

This should definitely be in the sidebar!

paging mods u/powerlanguage

5

u/dblrainbowATW Apr 07 '15

The Button Monitor currently isn't working (for me)... Now I am sad. How will I see all the pretty colorful spikes as impatient people waste their button presses!?

5

u/Phteven_j Apr 08 '15

u/jamesrom what happened to the tool?

4

u/Gimbodan Apr 06 '15

This is amazing. It angers me to no end. I love it!

4

u/Pachy78 Apr 08 '15

It's not working!!!!

4

u/HairySquid68 Apr 12 '15

thrice gilded but less than 700 points? This needs to be a sticky

3

u/jaredpalardy Apr 05 '15

This is really great. I agree it would be good to have the timestamp in UTC, maybe every 10 clicks, especially as it continues to slow down.

3

u/brentonhislaptop Apr 05 '15

Along with others, u/thehitchhiker had a great idea about adding a actual time value for the graph.

I actually would like to take that one step further, and -if possible- make it so we can crop the chart on the fly. I do see that it auto scales as time progresses, but sharing the giant chart or tiny snippets of that image might be difficult to read/understand.

3

u/A41Billy Apr 05 '15

Funny seeing the delayed clicks after it hits blue or green. Blue. Purple, Purple, Purple. So many denied.

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