I am looking for a tool that would not only allow me to create a system diagram but also allow me to give it some "brains".
For instance, lets say I have 2 main parts of a system depicted by 2 blocks. I want to simulate what would happen if one of the parts went out so I right click on one of the boxes and select terminate. The box then turns red, the connection to the other box turns red, and then the final box turns red as well. This indicates that the whole system is down.
I hope this makes sense.
Thank you!
I am not really sure what are you looking for, but maybe using code generation from models and/or executable UML tools could help you achieve what are you aiming for. For the particular example you mention, some sort of dependency analysis would suffice, e.g. there are some OSGi tools which can do that AFAIK.
Related
Good day, I was wondering on how can I implement an effect like the ones on the sweepstakes where you scratch the grey part and reveal a number underneath it. I was wondering how can I implement that in unity, I don't have any clue where to start, thanks in advance.
the idea is, I have 2 overlapping objects, A and B, whereas when I click on a part of B it will be removed and will show a part of A, both A and B are sprite images though
This is not really related to Unity as such. This relates more to a general technical solution for a visual representation you would like to do.
So, let's skip the Unity part.
But even then the question is very general and hard to respond to. There are many ways to achieve this, depending on the result you want.
You could apply a quad object, with a grey texture on top of whatever number box you have and then either use shaders to show the number as you "scratch it". Or you could remove the grey square when clicking it (different behaviour). Or you could do the old school approach and replace pixels, as you "scratch" the box.
Only to mention a few ideas.
But still, the question is very general and hard to answer as it pertains to a general idea, and not so much a concrete question.
Look into how to build Fog of war shader. I would achieve this by rendering A and B with two separate cameras then as you scratch it off it would reveal B in the scratched area.
I want to code sth. that basically works like TiVo. Switch it on, you only see the menu or an output, so no underlying OS or anything else is directly visible to the user.
So I want to use Linux as base. Can you suggest a good base distribution?
Can I code a frontend without having a window-manager up and running?
If yes, is that possible with java-gnome or what language/gui-framework combination would you suggest?
If no, what's the minimal window manager that can handle fancy menus, etc?
What does it take to create video-overlays over a HD-stream? Are there some libraries I should take a look at?
Thanks
Yes. If you only have one window you don't need a window manager. Using X you can start some application and set it's position and size from the commandline (making it fullscreen). You might want to take a look at xinit if this is what you want. This is likely the easiest why to get something working. But another option is skip X and use DirectFB. If you want to display several windows, on the other hand, you need some sort of window manager to manage them.
As long as you run X there is no problem using java-gnome as framework if that's what you are confortable with. I guess you didn't mean to run the stock gnome applications, but code everything visible to the user yourself.
This very much depends on what you mean with fancy menus. If you mean transparancy and such you need a composite manager (if you don't just render everything yourself inside your application window). I'm not sure about this but I think you can run a composite manager independent from a window manager if you find that suitable. Again, this is if you run X. Using DirectFB transparency and such are done in a more simple way.
If you intend to write your own media player you should take a look at GStreamer. It can stream, decode and display video and also add video-overlays (among other things) and is extremly easy to use.
Minimalistic tiling window manages like Awesome, Ratpoison or XMonad may be useful as a base, otherwise you'll have to manage focus and window sizing yourself. It is normally fairly easy to make these invisible to the user.
Absolutely.
I wouldn't count on Gnome itself working without a window manager. Other than that... language doesn't matter.
Window managers only do window management. Menus and the like are the job of the widget toolkit. Anyways, Metacity.
... This one I have no clue about.
I want to build a program that will (as part of what it's doing) display lines organically growing and interacting horizontally across the screen. Here's a sample image, just imagine the lines sprouting from the left and growing to the right:
The lines would look like the lines used on Google Maps Transit Overlay or OnNYTurf's transit pages.
It's a personal project, so I'm open to just about any language and library combination. But I don't know where to start. What have you used in the past to create graphics that are similar to this? What would you recommend? I want it to run on Windows without any extras needed (.Net is fine), and it doesn't have to run elsewhere. I needs to run as an actual program, not javascript in the browser.
There's obviously no 'right' answer to this, but the purpose isn't to start an argument about X better than Y but rather just find a list of graphics toolkits that do simple 2D graphics that people recommend because of their ease of use or community or whatever.
Processing may be just the tool for you.
Like you said, there are many ways to tackle this problem. Me personally, being it is a windows based project, I would go with the .NET based implementation utilizing WPF. There are tutorials on how to use the 2D drawing feature out there ( http://www.wpftutorial.net/DrawOnPhysicalDevicePixels.html for one ) Again, there is no right answer here. I might also pick some new technology and let your project be a mechanism to learn something new, providing you do not have a looming deadline.
Let me explain what I mean by "two-dimensional code editor": imagine of using Inkscape or Gimp in a big canvas (say infinite). The "T - add text" tool is used to write the code. Additionally, all function definitions will be framed and links will connect the called functions.
In other words: you have a very large sheet of (virtual) paper where you can write.
It would be really useful. I don't want to write code as a long list of lines, especially now that big monitors are cheaper.
Is such a code editor out there?
What's your opinion? Would you use a 2d code editor?
I've written 3 or 4 visual editors and my second one worked like this, that was for java and c++ (never published, though I did use it for some published research work)
I still don't like much to write my code 'as a long list of lines'. My point is, after trying a system like this, I tried a windowed system (class outlines in windows, right click to open code editors), then a tree based system...
in the long run (I wrote several apps using all of those), the tree based system with non overlapping windows felt at once most scalable (to different monitor sizes) and foremost, most productive, because dragging the text boxes and links and/or windows in the first version was necessary, without adding much to the programming experience, so it felt wasteful.
If you want to try some of this stuff out, you can google antegram for java (java only) antegram for web (javascript/php/actionscript) and ee-ide (on oogtech.org). I'm not sure if I could dig up the original c++/java textbox + links editor (which could collapse graphs as well, and had an infinite canvas, so pretty close to what you describe).
I'm not working on this as much as I used to as few programmers ever seemed to like it except me, but if you like working the tree way, or feel like adding stuff for your own purposes, ee-ide would be the way to go, as it's nicely modular and easy to extend compared to the rest.
On the commercial side, you can configure visual studio to work with UML-like diagrams. I have a feel it might be a little too heavy (although it's definitely more coding than UML oriented), but I'm not sure, I haven't really tried yet.
This probably doesn't answer your question exactly, but anyway.
Have a look at the NodeBox beta . It is a visual programming environment mostly for creating generative graphics. You can program and edit the nodes with python code, connect and reuse them in multiple ways. (Windows and Mac OS)
Also worth mentioning (in terms of concept) is Field . It is for programming performances and arranges bits of code on a stage/timeline. Very interesting but also very confusing. (Mac OS only)
Third one is vvvv. It is used a lot by graphical artists to create realtime 3d visuals. Node based. (Windows only)
NodeBox and Field are open-source, so if you are looking to create something yourself you can see how it's done there.
Check this out. I came across it today and remembered this question.
Code Bubbles
Developers spend significant time
reading and navigating code fragments
spread across multiple locations. The
file-based nature of contemporary IDEs
makes it prohibitively difficult to
create and maintain a simultaneous
view of such fragments. We propose a
novel user interface metaphor for code
understanding and maintanence based on
collections of lightweight, editable
fragments called bubbles, which form
concurrently visible working sets.
The essential goal of this project is
to make it easier for developers to
see many fragments of code (or other
information) at once without having to
navigate back and forth. Each of these
fragments is shown in a bubble.
A bubble is a fully editable and
interactive view of a fragment such as
a method or collection of member
variables. Bubbles, in contrast to
windows, have minimal border
decoration, avoid clipping their
contents by using automatic code
reflow and elision, and do not overlap
but instead push each other out of the
way. Bubbles exist in a large,
pannable 2-D virtual space where a
cluster of bubbles comprises a
concurrently visible working set.
Bubbles support a lightweight grouping
mechanism, and further support
connections between them.
A quantiative user study indicates
that Code Bubbles increased
performance significantly for two
controlled code understanding tasks. A
qualitative user study with 23
professional developers indicates
substantial interest and enthusiasm
for the approach, despite the radical
departure from what developers are
used to.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm
At one point, LabView had a programming mode like this. You connected program blocks together in a graphical way.
It's been so long since I've used LabView that I don't know if it is still the same.
For me, the MVVM pattern means that there's no code behind the UI controls anyway. The logic is all in a class with properties.
The properties use WPF databinding to update the UI controls. For example, on the form or window, page, whatever, MySearchButton.IsEnabled is bound to ViewModel.MySearchButtonIsEnabled property. So the app logic runs in the ViewModel class and just sets its own properties and the UI updates automatically.
Although this is specific to MS WPF the pattern actually stems from SmallTalk and is found across the development field as MVP. Without WPF one would need to write the databinding or 'presenter' logic, which is common.
This means the UI can be torn off and a new one pasted-in really quickly and with little code knowledge from the UI guy - who, in an ideal world, is a crack creative guy that drives a 70s Citroen.
So my point is that, although it sounds like a neat innovation, a 2D editor like this would be assisting a coding style that is no longer considered optimal.
Like any responsible developer, I'd like to make sure that the sites I produce are accessible to the widest possible audience, and that includes the significant fraction of the population with some form of colour blindness.
There are many websites which offer to filter a URL you feed it, either by rendering a picture or by filtering all content. However, both approaches seem to fail when rendering even moderately complex layouts, so I'd be interested in finding a client-side approach.
The ideal solution would be a system filter over the whole screen that can be used to test any program. The next best thing would be a browser plugin.
I came across Color Oracle and thought it might help. Here is the short description:
Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator for Windows, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.
Color Oracle is great, but another option is KMag, which is part of KDE in Linux. It's ostensibly a screen magnifier, but can simulate protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia.
It differs from Color Oracle by requiring an additional window in which to display the re-coloured image, but an advantage is that one can modify the underlying image at the same time as previewing the simulation.
Here is a screenshot showing the original figure on the left, and the KMag window on the right, simulating protanopia.
Here's a link to a website that simulates various kinds of color blindness:
http://www.vischeck.com/
They let you check URL's and Screenshots with three kinds of different color blindness types (URL checking is a bit dated though. Image-check works better).
I'd encourage everyone to check their applications btw. Seeing your own app with others eyes may be an eye opener (pun intended).
I know this is a quite old question, but I've recently found an interesting solution to transparently simulate color blindness.
When working with Linux, you can simulate color blindness using the Color Filter plugin for Compiz. It comes with profiles for deuteranopia and protonopia und changes the colors of the whole screen in real-time.
It's very nice because it works transparently in all applications (even within Youtube-Videos), but it will only work where Compiz is available, e.g. only under Linux.
Here's an article that has some guidelines for optimizing UI for color blind users:
Particletree ยป Be Kind to the Color Blind
It contains a link to another article with the kind of tools you were asking for:
10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design | 456 Berea Street
A great paper that explains a conversion that preserves color differences is:
Detail Preserving Reproduction of color images for Monochromats and Dichromats.(PDF)
I haven't implemented the filter, but I plan to when I have some more free time.
I found Colour Simulations easy to use on Windows 10. This software can apply a color-blind filter to a part of the screen or the whole screen. And what's great is it allows me to interact with my PC normally as if it doesn't exist in fullscreen mode. It runs quite slow in my 4K screen using an integrated graphics card, though.