Visualizations - What's Possible
To get an idea of what visualizations look like and what's possible with them on the WhenHub platform, click the image of our Whencast Explorer below, which lets you explore one schedule ("Top Grossing Movies by Year") with many different visualizations available on our platform.
WhenHub API - What's Possible
As with any API, you are only limited by your imagination in how it can be used. The WhenHub Studio gives you an example of what's possible using our API. You can use it as the back-end of a mobile app that uses time-based information, or integrate it with an existing web app that has time as one component along with other information.
Guidance for Best Visualization Categories
In the course of building the WhenHub platform we have encountered (we think) pretty much every widget, plugin and standard way for displaying time-based information on the web today. If your entry just uses these common, well-known techniques for displaying time-based information, it will not be very competitive. We encourage you to be creative and think of new and exciting ways to visualize time-based information. Think outside the grid-style box that is used to depict most date/time-based information.
It's perfectly okay if your visualization is designed for a niche audience. For example, you might come up with a novel way to depict football league schedules, or perhaps conference agendas, or even following a recipe to cook a meal. We don't want to stifle your creativity and make no assumptions about the use-cases to which your visualization applies. That said, we do expect that whatever the use-case you select, your visualization will need to work with any schedule that meets the criteria. As an example, you might create a visualization that uses a map to display events based on their location. It's reasonable to expect that such a visualization will work with any schedule whose events have a location.
As you design your visualization, keep in mind that it must degrade gracefully when required content is not present. An example of this is if you create a visualization that requires each event to have at least three images, but when used with a schedule that has fewer images it instantly crashes. Or, you have allowed two lines for the description, but the schedule has events with 20-line descriptions. Dealing with such scenarios requires planning and careful design. When judging your entry, we will try it with various public schedules available on our site to see how well your visualization adapts. We highly recommend you test with different schedules during development so you can plan for missing or inadequate content.
One more thing...typically, visualizations will show high-level information for events in a schedule. But an event might have an unlimited number of photos, videos, documents, links and also rich-text information. In order to make it easy for visualization developers, we have created a built-in Details View that is automatically available for all visualizations. To see an example, follow this link: https://studio.whenhub.com/schedules/57c443f4e899ed5809ffc36e This is an example of the default WhenHub platform visualization called "Cards." It displays events as vertical cards, and you can click on any event to view all the details for the event. The Details View you see in this visualization is automatically provided by WhenHub. For the Hackathon, you may use the built-in Details View or create your own.
Be creative, have fun and make something interesting!