Instructions for Using the DendroStar Applet

Screencast

Here is a two minute screencast about the DendroStar applet.

Mouse rollover

The mouse is used to highlight subtrees of the dendrogram. This works merely by rolling the mouse over the part of the dendrogram that you wish to highlight. The indicated subtree of the dendrogram will be highlighted using the currently selected “tint”. The isosurface value is also shown as a rollover highlight on the dendrogram. It is displayed in red text so that it always be visible against all the other colors used.

When a subtree of the dendrogram is highlighted, the corresponding areas of the image are also highlighted. The image highlight is always in red so that the highlighted area will always stand out. This becomes an issue if several different tints have been previously been applied to different areas of the image.

The highlighted isosurface label number and value are displayed in black text at the bottom of the dendrogram. The label number is not typically terribly important, so it is relegated to the bottom of the screen in unassuming black text. The isosurface value is also show here. This might be considered somewhat redundant, as the isosurface value is also displayed as red rollover text, but having it additionally at the bottom of the display has two benefits: (1) it is shown here with more digits of precision than is shown directly on the dendrogram (the number of digits there is kept relatively low so as to avoid visual clutter), and (2) it is always in the same place, which can be ergonomically beneficial at times.

Mouse rollover is also used to highlight a button if the mouse is over the button.

Left-click on the dendrogram

Clicking the mouse on the dendrogram is used to apply a tint to the dendrogram and to the image. The currently highlighted parts of the dendrogram and of the image will be tinted with the current tint selection.

An exception to the above statement occurs if an area of the dendrogram is already tinted. Only leaf nodes of the tree can be re-tinted with a left-click. For larger subtrees of the dendrogram the current tint must be removed before that subtree can be re-tinted. The reason for this interface decision is so that it is not too easy for you to accidentally overwrite the tinting of a large part of the dendrogram if you already carefully applied different tints to different subtrees.

If you left-click on a subtree that is already partially tinted, but not completely tinted, then the current tint will be applied to all un-tinted nodes in that subtree.

Right-clicking is used to remove the tint from the highlighted subtree of the dendrogram.

Right-click on the dendrogram

Right-clicking on the dendrogram will remove any tints from the currently highlighted subtree. The corresponding tints are also removed from the image.

Buttons

There are five buttons in the applet: three for selecting the current tint, one which allows you to toggle the image tint on and off, and one to reset both the dendrogram and image to an un-tinted state.

The tint-toggle button serves two purposes: (1) It allows you to temporarily turn off the tint if you would like to look at the image un-tinted for a while, yet not lose the work you've put into tinting the image. (2) It allows you to rapidly toggle back and forth between the tinted and un-tinted image in order to compare the two.

Shift key

Holding down the shift key lets you highlight and select individual nodes of the dendrogram using mouse rollover, as opposed to entire subtrees, which is the default behavior.

I now believe this option to be of marginal usefulness, however. (Until very recently it was the default behavior, but I changed the default behavior upon conferring with a colleague.) Consequently, this feature might be removed from a future version.

Keyboard shortcuts

DendroStar/help (last edited 2008-05-21 23:22:44 by nessus)