Posts Tagged UI

Code Complete

I recently finished reading Steve McConnell’s “Code Complete”. In hindsight, I should have kept a list of all of the great things contained inside the book. The book is packed with information on software design and construction, lots of examples, and even more references to other sources. McConnell outlines the professional development plan used at his company, making it easy for anyone to get on a useful reading track.

And I have. I have read two of the references within this book (not necessarily in the professional development plan), and they have turned out to be worthwhile. The first was a classic, “How to win friends & influence people”, b Dale Carnegie. The other was, Conceptual Blockbusting.

Another related Amazon suggested reading was Donald Norman’s, “The design of everyday things”. I read most of this on my plane ride to Japan, and finished it this morning. It talks about all the things designers should (and shouldn’t do) to make products (or software) easy, intuitive, and just plain user-friendly. The book is comforting in the sense that it discusses how failure to use something (a tool, a software), is often the fault of bad design. Out of the book, some of the most important points of design are really what should be almost common sense; things like providing a clear mental model, making the system state visible, hiding functions that aren’t necessary for a task, and using standards. The book gives plenty of good references to everyday objects that were poorly designed (several examples of doors and faucets). And I was even surprised to read that the author uses (or used) emacs. I will definitely be coming back to this book the next time I (try) and design a UI.

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MCap

Capture from multiple libdc1394 /firewire cameras on different hosts. Each host can have several cameras. The library bases the multi-host communication on the pvm library. Higher level classes are used to develop the UI (Qt)

Mode of operation assumes that recorded files will be sent back and used in post processing. Files can be encoded on the client side (using mencoder) and then transferred back, or saved in a raw binary form for transfer after. Alternatively, for short sequences, or when the disk or encoding is a bottleneck, the client side saves images in memory buffers and transfers them after the recording is complete. Raw files from multiples hosts are merged and can be viewed with a simple multi-video viewer. File transfer is done with a combination of scp/ssh and TCP/IP sockets; as such it will probably take some effort to port to windows.

MCap supports changing features and settings, or loading configurations of cameras from files (in a crude manner).

Mcap screenshot

Issues: changing video modes sometimes causes failures (possibly due to trying to allocate more bandwidth than the1394 bus can handle). Failure is painful due to

Planned (Maybe): add ability to plugin framesinks (for transfer, encoding), or other filters and processing so the client can do processing in real-time applications.

To come: possibly a system architecture, source code, and some videos.

mcap2_ms

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