It would be nice to have a richer way of controlling, on the
client, how tracks are displayed. I don't have too many ideas for
specific config settings for tracks (the UCSC browser has a ton,
though), but at the very least it would be nice to have a stub of a
UI that opens a track config panel. For example, click the track
title and a little config panel pops up.
Once the stub is implemented, here are some suggestions for what
the panel can control:
-
Setting the height of a track in pixels. This is particularly
useful for figure prep and makes the most sense for wiggle tracks
(probably not for feature tracks, except for histogram view).
Sometimes you want to blow it up to show something, sometimes you
don't, but re-generating pre-rendered wiggles on the server to
change the height is too time consuming and not suitable for
preparing many figures. There should be a toggle, though, to let
the browser auto-set it.
-
For feature tracks, change layout algorithm -- cf UCSC Browser's
"pack", "dense", etc. modes.
-
Change other thresholds, e.g. when gene names get displayed (or
enable/disable gene names). Once again, for making figures for
publications -- sometimes you don't want to display all the feature
names! This is related to the above point.
-
Change threshold for when feature tracks change to histogram
density tracks.
I'm sure people can come up with many more, but before
implementing them, one needs to have a UI or API or some sort of
frame on which other folks can start tacking on whatever crazy
track control features they want.