What to do after the closure of Midnight Mars Browser? Options

[paraisosdelsiste...]

I've been a heavy user of Midnight Mars Browser for several years and I'm incredibly grateful for the work that Michael has done.

Now I ask myself, should we create again an alternative way to look and search for images coming from Mars? In the last several months I developed a way to ingest InSight images in order to have a small database and a telegram bot that tells me when a new image is uploaded to the InSight web site and I can try to do the same with the MSL imagery.

But, I have several questions: What is the better way to show the data in the web page? Which is the best way to order the images?

I'd love to hear some suggestions for that.

Greetings.

[nogal]

Here is an improved (I hope!) version of my MSL Image Viewer. Still work in progress so, for the time being, I'll continue to distribute it here. Having been on vacation last week I only had time to implement part of your suggestions - thank you all for those.

To install, download the zip file to your favourite location and unzip it. You should see the following 5 files:

• MSLImageViewer.html - the main page and the only one you should call;
• MSLImageDisplay.html - called from the main page to display a single image in large format, with associated information ;
• MSLImageUrlList.html - called from the main page to display a list of URLs of the currently selected (visible) images ;
• MSLImageViewer.css - Cascading Style Sheets for the project ;
• MSLImageViewer.js - JavaScript code for the project.

I made a general review of the code to make it more robust and changed the layout a bit (it is stable now).

Opening the MSLImageDisplay.html page automatically loads the images (in small format) of the most recent sol. Below the header, on the left, there is a bar with several sections: a sol navigator, sol statistics, image filters, and option selectors. To its right lies the images area.

The sol navigator has:

• two buttons to move to the previous or the next sol that has images - sols with zero images are skipped over. "First sol" and "Last sol" stoppers are dynamically generated. Buttons are accordingly disabled.

• an input field to directly go to any sol - if the sol does not exist or has no images a message is issued and the sol does not change.

Below the navigator there is a panel with a few statistics for the sol.

Next comes the image filters panel. Those are grouped into two categories: cameras (mastcam, chemcam, hazard, etc.) and image types (full, subframe, etc.). Only the entries that exist on the sol are shown. It is now possible to select one or more entries in each category. Entries in the same category are ORed and the two categories and ANDed. For instance, select all Front Haz Right and Left cams but only for full frame images. "Show all" and "Hide all" buttons per category provide shortcuts.

These filters are "sticky". When you move from sol to sol only the categories that were previously selected will be shown - until you change them. But note that all the images for the sol will still be loaded. Having selected (or deselected) a category that does exist on the new sol does not cause an error.

Entries are selected by toggle buttons. A green or red rim indicates whether the filter is active or not.
The option selectors panel currently contains just one button. The "List URLs (of visible images)" button opens a new page with the list of full URLs of the images that are currently visible. The page has a "Copy to the clipboard" button.
The page's right side contains the sol's images. Place the mouse over an image to reveal the image's full URL.

Clicking on an image opens it in a new page and shows the associated information. Images are shown at their natural size, if they fit the screen, otherwise they will be reduced to fit. From this page you can load the previous or the next image. Any number of such pages can be simultaneously open, allowing, for instance, to compare the images.

In addition to the suggestions I did not have the time to implement I have other ideas. For instance, highlighting the recent images.
But what is recent? 24h? 48h? 1 week? Please tell me your opinion. It is very easy to highlight recently added images for a specific sol. But finding all recently added images implies going through the json files for all sols. This takes time and uses network and should perhaps be implemented as an on-demand process (this is the drawback of a client-side, versus server-side, implementation).

Your feedback is requested and most welcome. Sorry for the long post.
Fernando
EDIT: the attachment has been removed. A new version, supporting more functions, is available. See post #56