title: JavaFX timeline playback slider firing events at asynchronous time points
body: <p>I'm attempting to implement a custom slider with a rectangular strip above it with lines representing events at certain points in time, as shown in the diagram below. It's basically a timeline above a slider, which event depicted as vertical lines.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQNY9.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQNY9.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>The diagram shows 14 vertical lines in between the start (t=0) and end (t=x) of the slider. Each line corresponds an arbitrary event with some contextual information.</p>
  
  <p>The slider will play in real-time, i.e. the thumb will move along its track at a real-time pace. When the slider passes an event's specified time, it will print the event's contextual information in a text area. Using the diagram, the information for the event at 14 seconds is currently being shown.</p>
  
  <p>QUESTIONS: 
  1. How do I make the thumb move in real-time?
  2. How do I detect that the thumb has reached an event and therefore fire an event that triggers new output on the text area?</p>
  
  <p>My approach would be to process all events and create a timer for each to fire at the associated time. This seems rather inelegant. And there will be a future requirement to be able to drag the thumb around to any point in time and having to create timer events everytime that occurs seems very inefficient.</p>
  
  <p>I'm using JavaFX and so i would like to leverage the property binding as much as possible. I have tons of experience pre-Java 8 but this is the first time i'm using Java 8 in anger.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you.</p>