Saturday, August 31, 2013
Depsgraph - Pose Component Graph Building Example
This is a just quick update with a scanned diagram showing the steps involved in building the depsgraph nodes for pose evaluation (and ensuring that this setup has dependencies hooked up correctly to enforce evaluation order constraints for the scheduler).
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
PyQt Widgets - TagLabels and Canvas.Backdrop
As part of my research work, I'm currently spending quite a bit of time developing prototype interfaces/widgets. In my case, my current "weapon of choice" is Python2 + PyQt (with progress logged in Git), as it gives me fast turnarounds, nice and familiar API's, and a modern + industrial-grade base UI library.
Today, I'm going to release a few "support" widgets which I've developed for use as part of my toolkit/workflow:
1) TagLabels
https://bitbucket.org/Aligorith/pyqttooltipslib (Currently in "TagLabels" branch)
2) Canvas.Backdrop
Today, I'm going to release a few "support" widgets which I've developed for use as part of my toolkit/workflow:
1) TagLabels
2) Canvas.Backdrop
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Interesting Libraries
I've recently come across a few very interesting libraries online. While not as complex as some of the traditional "all-inclusive" monsters such as JQuery, Boost, GLib, and friends, these libraries all exhibit a number of very exciting and interesting characteristics while remaining quite simple overall (by cleverly exploiting basic capabilities of the technologies they are implemented in).
These are:
1. Bret Victor's "Tangle"
http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
2. Cello - High Level Programming in C
http://libcello.org/
These are:
1. Bret Victor's "Tangle"
http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
2. Cello - High Level Programming in C
http://libcello.org/
RIP Beautiful Firefox Logo
Argh! This evening, Firefox finally ended up updating to the latest version (23 IIRC). Even though this had officially been released for almost a week now, I'd somehow managed to "dodge" getting the update until tonight.
RIP - The beautiful Firefox logo/icon used since 3.5 or so...
Saturday, August 3, 2013
My Current Diagramming Workflow
In the past, I've ranted a bit about the current state of diagramming tools in general. The majority of my comments there still stand - all of those issues are still as pertinent as ever, particularly
1) Connectors and snapping points being finicky + tricky to control
2) Bounded canvas sizes - the need to set this explicitly at the start of creating a diagram, even if you just want to worry about figuring out the content first and only THEN bounding/fitting these until they're at a decent scale
3) Default item sizing often being off-the-charts - the chief culprits are usually things like arrowheads being too large and fat, line widths defaulting to being too thin at 1px, shapes having internal "padding" which forces text to wrap + collide with the borders in unsightly ways (with no easy way of clearing this for all new objects), and text being too large/small by default, yet always overflowing the containers exactly when you don't want them to
4) Overly optimistic context switching - not everyone agrees with me on this one, but it's just plain annoying that you sometimes have to click things multiple times to get the intended handles (or rather get out of "internal content editing" sub-modes that you accidentally entered while trying instead to grab the whole object or one of its handles)
However, as seen from some of my recent posts, I have in recent months found that LibreOffice's Draw seems to at least be a bit more palatable than many of the other alternatives out there for many of these issues, despite still suffering from all these issues mentioned above (plus a few additional limitations, which I'll get to in a moment).
1) Connectors and snapping points being finicky + tricky to control
2) Bounded canvas sizes - the need to set this explicitly at the start of creating a diagram, even if you just want to worry about figuring out the content first and only THEN bounding/fitting these until they're at a decent scale
3) Default item sizing often being off-the-charts - the chief culprits are usually things like arrowheads being too large and fat, line widths defaulting to being too thin at 1px, shapes having internal "padding" which forces text to wrap + collide with the borders in unsightly ways (with no easy way of clearing this for all new objects), and text being too large/small by default, yet always overflowing the containers exactly when you don't want them to
4) Overly optimistic context switching - not everyone agrees with me on this one, but it's just plain annoying that you sometimes have to click things multiple times to get the intended handles (or rather get out of "internal content editing" sub-modes that you accidentally entered while trying instead to grab the whole object or one of its handles)
However, as seen from some of my recent posts, I have in recent months found that LibreOffice's Draw seems to at least be a bit more palatable than many of the other alternatives out there for many of these issues, despite still suffering from all these issues mentioned above (plus a few additional limitations, which I'll get to in a moment).
Depsgraph – Mid-Term Updates and Revised Design (“Components”)
Over the past few weeks, there have been relatively few updates about the status of the Depsgraph Refactor project, apart from the regular weekly updates (which have been admittedly a bit vague). That's because I've been busy actually hacking away at it! There's only so much time in a day (or rather, after sleep and research work commitments), so regular blog post updates have taken a bit of a back seat for a while. Nevertheless, today I'll be presenting a little overview of what's been going on, and where we're going now.
Components - The "key" to the new design