Playback & Scrubbing

Overview

The timeline is the central control for navigating through time-correlated data. All panels synchronize to the timeline - scrubbing the timeline updates every visible image, graph, and annotation simultaneously.

Timeline Controls

The timeline bar sits at the bottom of the Nexus window. It contains:

Element	Description
Play / Pause button	Start or pause continuous playback
Stop button	Stop playback and return to the start
Speed selector	Choose or enter a custom playback speed
Zoom controls	Zoom In, Zoom Out, Fit (show full range), and Reset buttons
Sync toggle	Enable signal sync mode for aligning signals by dragging
Scrubber	Vertical green cursor line that can be dragged to any time
Signal sparklines	Miniature graphs showing signal values over the full time range
Notes track	Visual markers and bars for timestamp and timespan notes; click the + next to the cursor to add a note

Scrubbing

Drag the timeline cursor to move to any point in your experiment. All panels update in real time - images change frame, graphs move their cursor, and annotation values refresh.

You can also click anywhere on the timeline track area to jump directly to that time.

Playback

Press Play (or the Space bar) to start continuous playback. Nexus advances through the data at the selected speed, updating all panels simultaneously.

Control	Action
Space	Play / Pause

Selection

Hold Shift and drag on the time axis to select a time region. The selection is highlighted with a blue tint. Drag the edges of the selection to adjust its boundaries.

When a selection is active, three buttons appear:

• Zoom to selection — zooms the timeline to show only the selected range
• + — creates a timespan note from the selected range
• Clear selection (×) — removes the selection

Signal Sparklines

Each signal added to the timeline is represented by a colour-coded sparkline that shows the signal’s trend over the entire experiment. Click a sparkline to select the corresponding signal.