This week we’ve updated the Project Dasher site with a new build – the first update we’ve made in nearly a year. (I’ve talked about some of the rewrite work in a previous post, but it’s taken a while to get around to making it all available.)
One of the major improvements has been with the timeline component. At some point in the future I’ll spend some time talking more about the timeline’s features – it’s available publicly via NPM and is integrated into the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization extension reference application – but for now I just wanted to share some information about an issue we’re currently struggling with.
For people using an Intel-based Mac running the latest macOS version (Monterey) and the latest version of Chrome – or Chromium-based browsers such as Brave – (v100), the timeline isn’t rendering properly: the timeline area just stays grey. You can see it here, below. What’s really interesting is that the problem exists for all versions of the timeline (I tested as far back as v3.0.0, and we’re currently on v5.3.1).
Curiously M1-based Macs running Monterey and Chrome are just fine, as are older versions of macOS and all Windows versions (as far as I’m aware). Browsers such as Safari and Firefox are fine, so that’s been the solution I’ve had to adopt on my own system. This has in turn led to me focusing time on some Firefox-specific issues that have needed addressing, as I fully admit that until now the primary focus has been on supporting Chrome. Fun times. Sigh.
We’re working on isolating the problem, although I suspect we’ll need to wait for an update either to Pixi.js, to Chrome or perhaps even to this model of Mac’s graphics driver. If you’ve integrated the timeline into your application and you have customers hitting this problem, a stopgap should be to switch to Firefox or Safari until an update is available. Hopefully we’ll have a fix in place soon, one way or another.
Aside from the work to update Dasher, we’ve also been making progress on the Tandem integration. We now have tooltips shown when hovering over Tandem sensor dots as well as graphs being displayed when you click on them. All in all we’re now getting very close to feature parity between the Forge viewer and Tandem versions (and they’re both running off the same core code, which is pretty neat).
And finally, for those of you (like me) who missed it, the Autodesk Tandem April 2022 webinar is well worth a watch. In it you’ll see my friend Hali Larsen talking more about Dasher-like features are being built into Tandem.
Exciting times!
