Cytobank – As the cell flows

New and Improved Interface for Figure Dimensions

July 22, 2011 at 11:04 am cytobank 1 comment

If you’ve logged into Cytobank recently, you will have noticed some changes with the Figure Dimension interface. We’re excited about these changes, which we think will make building your plots even faster and easier than before. We briefly discussed these changes in last month’s release notes and elaborate on them in this blog post.

What do you think of the new interface? Please let us know in the comments below or email us at helpdesk@cytobank.org.

One of the first things we improved was the drag and drop motion of the Figure Dimension boxes (such as Channels, Populations, Conditions, etc.). In the new interface, rearranging Figure Dimensions is much smoother. The Dimension boxes now have grip handles to indicate that the box can be dragged and dropped. When you start to drag the box, a gray box with a dotted outline indicates where the box will drop.

We also increased the width of each box and enabled wrap-around on the label names. This is especially useful with long label names (such as Channel names) which would get cut-off in the old interface.

In the new interface, each Dimension box now has two links:

1. “Choose” is a new feature that enables you to more easily select which annotated files you want to display in your Working Illustration.
2. “Setup” is what we used to call “Edit”. (And as before, the Populations Dimension has a link for “Gate”.)

Choose

In the old interface, you would shift-click to select multiple files, something that became unwieldy when there was more than one “page” of items to select. Now, instead of scrolling within the small Dimension box, an expanded interface allows you to easily select and rearrange the labels in each Dimension. Clicking “Choose” brings up a lightbox that displays all the labels for that Dimension. Checkboxes, filter words, and Select All or None options facilitate selecting multiple labels.

Changing the order of the labels within a Figure Dimension will now rearrange the layout of your plots in your Working Illustration. The grip handle on the righthand side of each label facilitates dragging to rearrange the labels in a desired order. (The Layout Placeholders view still works for rearranging layout.)

Setup

Clicking “Setup” is equivalent to clicking “Edit” in the old interface.

For Channels, “Setup” will bring you to the same page as before, where you can assign your FCS files to different staining panels and edit the names of your reagents. For other Figure Dimensions, “Setup” will bring you to the Annotation page, where you can add labels and assign those labels to your FCS files. This page underwent some small changes recently, as detailed in our release notes for Cytobank 2.3.4.1.

The Populations Figure Dimension contains a link for “Gate” instead of “Setup”. Clicking “Gate” in Populations opens the gating applet, where you can draw gates and define populations.

Watch a short video demonstrating the new Figure Dimensions interface.

Please bear with us as we work to update all of our documentation and video tutorials. If you have any questions about how to navigate the new Figure Dimension interface, you can always reach us at helpdesk@cytobank.org.

- The Cytobank Team

Entry filed under: Announcements, Cytobank. Tags: annotation, figure dimensions, grip handle, labels, layout placeholders, lightbox, tags.