Progress Report for the week of September 25, 1997

Accomplishments:

This week we made great progress with our research, especially on the web. We found many research papers online which contained a promising list of references. We also found references to a java port of Bill Hibbard's Vis5D package. There were also references to design documents and similar documentation. We converted the Functional Specifications file to a more legible format. This week we also spend a lot of time designing a GUI. Our belief is that we should not change the functionality of the interface too much, but we want to clean it up and make it easier to use at the same time. Fortunately for us, Java makes it easy to design clean interfaces. We quickly put together a prototype interface using a Java GUI builder.
screenshot1
screenshot2
We know that this design will change as we design it, but the basic ideas we wanted to implement were real drop down menus and a tool bar. When using XmdvTool, we found the menus to be rather akward. Also, Java makes it easy to implement toolbars, and they are quite useful in many places, and we believe this is one of them. We would like to have put the GUI online in order for others to try it out, but the GUI builder uses Java 1.0.2 and uses some proprietary, custom components that have equivalent functionality built into Java 1.1. We might have found a way around this by Thursday's meeting. We also came up with some ideas for extending the functionality. For instance, what about saving brush information? How about being able to print a brush? It is probably too early to be thinking too much about these things, but we don't believe they will be too much work to add them on if we design things well.

Questions:

To do List:
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