Getting Started

Installation

Please see here.

Launch using the data included in this repository

To start Firefly, you can simply open the index.html file with your browser. We recommend Firefox or Chrome. If you prefer Chrome, you may need to host your own server. This is easy to do by executing the following python command within the directory that contains your index.html file:

$ python2 -m SimpleHTTPServer
or
$ python3 -m http.server

Once this SimpleHTTPServer is running, you can open Chrome, and enter the url : http://localhost:8000/ . (This python step should not be necessary with Firefox, but may be necessary with other browsers.)

This will open the data set included within this repository.

Controls within Firefly

Interaction within Firefly should be intuitive, with the usual click drag and mouse wheel behavior. There is also a user interface with many options. Please see here for an in-depth description of this user interface Controls panel.

Using your own data

If you want to use your own data, you will first need to convert your data to the format needed by Firefly. We provide python tools to facilitate this, and a few examples that use FIRE simulation data. We included a simple startup script in this iPython notebook within the data directory that you can use to get started. There are many options available to customize the viewer and set defaults. These are explained in detail here.

Additional Notes

• Some browsers store more or less data in the cache. If you make a change to your data files, and reload the browser, but don't see the expected change in the visualization, this may be because the browser is using old cached files. In this case, we recommend clearing your browser's cache and reloading. For instance, in Chrome, you can click "Chrome -> Clear Browsing Data ...", the click the "Clear Data" button in the "Settings" window that is opened. A long click on the reload button can also bring up a menu allowing you to "Empty Cache and Hard Reload". Also holding "ctrl+F5" while clicking the reload button may help. Either (or all) of these should solve this problem.

• Most browsers will only let you access data from a directory already within the Firefly directory tree. As such, you should keep all your json files within the data directory, if you are using a Reader instance from dataParser.py then this is required! One trick to address this is to use symbolic links within the data directory pointing to elsewhere on your local disk, e.g.,

    $ ln -s /home/mydirectory/snapdir_xxx  

• For very large amounts of data, you may need to increase the memory allowed in your browser. To do so in Chrome, you can launch Chrome from the command line as (and change the numerical size value to something appropriate to your needs) :

    $ /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/./Google\ Chrome --args --js-flags="--max_old_space_size=8192"