aiSee 2.2.07 review

aiSee reads a textual, easy-to-read and easy-to-learn graph specification and automatically calculates a customizable graph layout

License: Shareware File size: 0K Developer: AbsInt.

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aiSee reads a textual, easy-to-read and easy-to-learn graph specification and automatically calculates a customizable graph layout. This layout is then displayed, and can be interactively explored, printed and exported to various graphic formats.

aiSee has been optimized to handle huge graphs automatically generated by applications. It is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

When working with any kind of complex relational data, visualization provides for much better and faster understanding. Back in 1991, aiSee was developed to visualize the internal data structures typically found in compilers.

Today it is widely used in many different areas:

Genealogy (family trees, evolution diagrams, pedigrees)
Business management (organization charts)
Software development (call graphs, control flow graphs)
Hardware design (circuit diagrams, finite state diagrams)
Database management (entity relationship diagrams)
Informatics (algorithm visualization)
Web design (sitemaps, P2P networks)

Here are some key features of "aiSee":
Excellent readability of calculated layouts:

Nodes are placed in a hierarchy of layers
Nodes are positioned without overlapping
Crossing of lines (edges) is reduced/avoided
Edges are kept short and straight

Fast layout calculation for huge graphs

15 basic layout algorithms, including

Force-directed layout
Depth-first-search layout
Specialized algorithm for layout of trees

Zooming of graphs and easy navigation

Easy printing of graphs on multiple pages

Export of graphs to BMP, colored PostScript, SVG, PNG and HTML

Graph nesting and advanced graph hierarchy operations like

Folding, unfolding, wrapping and clustering of complete subgraphs
Folding of user-defined graph regions
Excluding subgraphs or graph regions
Hiding of edges

Cartesian and polar fish-eye views

Animation of series of graphs and smooth transitions

Multi-line edge labels

Easy handling of huge graphs with as many as 1,000,000 nodes and 1,500,000 edges

Commands, hyperlinks, JavaScript functionality, and up to three additional information windows can be associated with each node and each subgraph

Nodes can be represented by user-defined bitmap icons

The input format GDL (graph description language) provides for very natural textual graph representation, and is also easy to learn.

Limitations:
30-day trial version

What's New in This Release:
Improved export of edges to bitmap formats.
Improved export to SVG: the output files are now up to 14% smaller.
Fixed bitmap image mapping bug.
Fixed bugs in the Show Neighbors implementation.
Fixed bugs in the Follow Edge implementation.
Fixed export of f- to SVG.
Other bugfixes.