More blocks

[t-makaro]

I'm opening a bunch of issues just to track progress.

This one is for new blocks!

The following have methods to update data which makes them prime candidates for blocks.

• Scatter plots
• Annotations

More blocks

• A block to shift the x/y-limits of an axis would be nice.
• A title block
• Update block (similar to the Nuke block but it doesn't clear the axes which allows for people to write a larger variety of custom updating blocks.)

The following blocks would be nice, but matplotlib doesn't have update methods for them.

• histograms
• pie charts

[Atticuss]

Any update on this by chance? Came back to this hoping to animate some scatter plot data.

[t-makaro]

I actually have most of the scatter plot block written. It can animate the points' location and size, but not the color. I've been considering cutting a release with all my improvements up to this point (maybe next weekend? I've been busy).

[TomNicholas]

Animating contour plots would also be nice, this stackoverflow post seems to show that it is possible.

(Also title block is done)

[t-makaro]

The trick in that stack overflow post of creating and deleting artists is intriguing. Great care would need to be taken to not have a memory leak.

[TomNicholas]

How about a colorbar block? At the moment the colorbar must be static, but at some point someone might want to use a colorbar whose limits evolve with the data?

[ianhi]

Hey @t-makaro great library! The usage of FuncAnimation to implement a play button is super clever.

I've been building a similar library mpl-interactions and also have a list like yours (mpl-extensions/mpl-interactions#59). I'm hoping we can share some of the figuring out of how to update various matplotlib elements. For example:

implementing hist:
I ended up implementing my own using a PatchCollection and I'd be happy to have it included in animatplot (see: https://github.com/ianhi/mpl-interactions/blob/0c6508cafee0c7e709d1d8ef9f12a3dadef70558/mpl_interactions/pyplot.py#L400-L419)

Also, in matplotlib 3.4 there will be a stairs method https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.stairs.html?highlight=stairs#matplotlib.axes.Axes.stairs which can create generic histogram like objects that have a set_data method (implemented in matplotlib/matplotlib#18275)

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re library similarity:

Our libraries accomplish similar goals but definitely have substantive differences such that I think we don't really infringe on eachother and can coexist happily :)

animatplot is much easier to save a gif from and works natively with arrays. Whereas mpl_interactions considers functions to be fundamental object that gets plotted and puts half of the focus onto ipywidgets.

Given my reliance on ipywidgets I probably would have made my library even if I'd been aware of animatplot earlier but back this summer when I started work I actually thought animatlplot was only for animations, I didn't realize it could be used interactively. I think that I was fooled by animatplot only being placed under the Animations section of the matplotlib 3rd party packages list. I think you have a real claim to also be listed under the Interactions heading. If you open a PR there adding a link to the interactions section as well I'd show up an argue for it.