The Movement - Returns!

These days I've been really busy coding because my change of schedule (AKA Japan grant). In fact, I'm busy right now, so not to make you waste your time, here you have another example of the movement on the desktop.




All the Jewels where generated for this video right before recording.

The Movement

Here is the video I promised in my last post. It displays a basic example of movement applied to OpenGL Jewels.



In this video we can appreciate two different effects, Shake and Movement (A.K.A. Run baby run!). Both created for testing purposes, in the final version they will be much more slower and ubiquitous. However, I've accelerated them for the video :-)


These days I've been working on the Design Tool used to create and personalize the Jewels. In the next post I'll talk about it and display a few screenshots or even a video of the Jewel creation process.

Back to the Origins

After the stop brought by the mid-term presentation day, I'm back!

These past days I've been playing around with the graphic layer of Ambient Jewelry. The result: I switch to OpenGL. One of the main reasons for doing this, is because of the lack of documentation in "normal drawing" and the lack of "cool" efects. If you have a really great software but is completely undocumented, it's worth nothing. So, after seeing the amount of tutorials and howtos that uses OpenGL, apart from the power of using the GPU. I consider this a good change.

Finally I got some OpenGL based Jewels with a 3D tetrahedron:




In the next post I'll upload a video showing some movements performed by the Jewels :-)

From now on, I'll focus on the Designer Tool and how the creation process is going to work.

One GEM to rule them all

Hi folks!

After a few days of headaches because of C++ pointer issues, now, I can say I have all the interface joined together. As the title of this entry says "One GEM to rule them all" all the interface windows are joint together under the main program on the system tray icon.

I took a moment to reboot on Windows Vista and take some pictures for the ocasion:


And its equivalent on Linux under KDE:



That big white and blue striped bubble is the first animated Gem with a basic and hypnotic effect. Not to overload this post with images, I'll put just one more to show the Design Tool Window and the Gem List Window. The Design Tool will be used to design the Gems, that is, apply the effects and transitions to the different actions. On the other hand, the Gem List Window will be the main window where all the Gems loaded and unloaded will be. From this window you'll be able to manage all your contact's Gems.



I must say that this windows are just mock ups and probably they wont have the same aspect in future versions.

I'd like to use this last lines to thank Mike for helping me understand C++ and its pointers :-) He ended up my last two days of headaches because of scope problems... now I can find another ones ;-)

System Tray: Returns

Here I am again, and here you have the promised screenshot of this first version running on Windows :-)


As you can see, things that could have been hard to code as transparencies or sizes are ubiquitous thanks to the Qt Toolbox. I'd like to remark the class QIcon which transforms the image given into the appropiate size to the system in which is running. An example of this, extracted from Gems code is:

QIcon icon = QIcon("gem.png");

Being gem.png a 70x70 px image with transparent background. Besides, it's important to highlight the diferences between the different platforms: On Windows, the system tray icon size is 16x16; on X11, the preferred size is 22x22. The icon will be scaled to the appropriate size as necessary.

System Tray

After a lot of hard work trying to figure out how Qt , C++, Eclipse, Linux & Windows can work together without killing each other, I've finally come to the very first version of the gems program.




It's just the systray interface, but it helps me understand how Qt works and which are its possibilities. The things I've seen from Qt really look amazing, and I feel I've just scratched the surface. I wish I had more time to spend on the graphic issues and get deep into OpenGL support of Qt. Imagine desktop widgets/gadgets based on OpenGL...

I've also established contact with the main developers of Superkaramba with the idea of studying the multiplatform environment and, maybe in the future, help them adapt Superkaramba to any platform supported by Qt.

These days I came across a lot of different technologies that I really like to deeply understand so as:

-CVS: Concurrent Versions System. A revision control system, popular for open source and commercial software development. I knew CVS already, but I never had enough time to use it properly.

-KDevelop: A free software integrated development environment for the KDE desktop environment for Unix-like computer operating systems.

-Eclipse: A software platform comprised of extensible application frameworks, tools and runtimes for software development and management, primarily written in Java. Its primary use is as an integrated development environment (IDE).

In future posts, I promise some Windows based screenshots :-)

The basis

What's first in every project is to specify its basis. The first days that I worked on this project, following the guidelines of one of my supervisors (Mike Bennett), I pined down the interface of the application, its uses, its future possibilities and modularity. Once a new project is started its really important to have clear what is the objective and how to achieve it. The initial idea was to base the project on Superkaramba (Plasma), the software that manages the desktop gadgets/widgets of KDE in Linux, building it as a plugin. It would use Python for the main program and XML to store the data. As one of the objectives is to get to the most people possible by creating a multiplatform software, the idea of Superkaramba was dismissed. The second idea was to use SDL, as the graphics is one of the strenghts in this project, and clearly SDL brings a lot of graphic power. After two days of hard work we get to the conclusion that SDL was not the right choice as it is excesively complicated, which is against another of the principles: Keep it simple. It really didn't give what we really want for this project. After a lot of tests, we get to the Qt Toolkit, from Trolltech. This is a demo of its possibilities:

A new aproach to HCI

Welcome my beloved visitors! My name is Germán Lado Insua and I'm one of the 16 fortunate people that got a position for the 2008 Odysseus Programme at UCD (University College of Dublin).

Basically the programme ODCSSS (Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School) is an undergraduate summer research internship which is part funded by an Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge grant (UREKA) from the Science Foundation Ireland.

I'm working under the guidance of Prof. Paddy Nixon and Mike Bennett in the project: Ambient Jewelry. The objective of this project is to explore the possibilities of direct connectedness between people by sharing their presence. In order to achieve this, I'm developing a software that combines a pinch of beauty with a bit of technology. The idea is to create a program that connects people in a more personal way. You'll be able to easily design your own Gem and share it with your friends so as they could have something only yours, that defines you, something that moves with you, works with you and have fun with you. Then you will share all these actions with your friends and at the same time, you'll be part of their lives. With your Gem, you'll make your friend's desktop be alive.

This blog will keep track of my research at UCD.