Specification

I had another meeting with my professor. The time for writing my bachelor thesis has come now and although I have enough other courses to be occupied all week, my work on Imageflow is back up. We talked about the thesis, the future of the project and tested the current prototype. We identified (alot of) bugs and noted the todo-list I can base my work on. So I know what feature will be left to do till april. There are quite a few and many thoughts what could be added in the future.

For the past few weeks, I always run around with a scrapbook. While, waiting I take it out and scribble strange stuff. Mostly related to this project. Sometimes, I just have no idea, other times, new ideas, arising problems or solutions just flyby and I note them down. Yesterday was very productive.

Not that much work today, however I moved the whole project to a new SVN and cleaned up a bit. So some long waiting fixes to the unit-tests were added (although, they aren't complete yet and probably won't be till November). I added some more documentation, many small things.

One change you can actually see is, that the Graph now gets a list of units, which actually have locations and so I don't have to move them by hand anymore. The locations are hardcoded of course, as is the actual UnitList, but as I'm rebuilding the functionality it begins to work out step by step. Yet, still many steps ahead.

The more I work in VisualAp, the more I understand the application. It's a natural thing. I also begin to see more parallels or more points, where my prototype and VisualAp are so similar, that I tend to try to merge it. I try to get as much functionality from VisAp, while I try to change as little as possible. There are still a few things wrecking my brain, but I hope to get them sorted soon.

While I was waiting for a train I doodled some sketches for the User Interface. for now this is neglectable, but in 2 weeks, it's supposed to look nice already.

Currently I'm working on two things. The major thing is trying to find the bridge between my flow-logic and the visual drawing-framework of VisualAp. VisualAp already has alot of the functionality I originally wanted, now, since the prototype of Prof Barthel, on which I'm developing goes technically in a different direction, I have to find where both conceptions can be combined. VisualAp bases it's Units on Java-Beans, small Jar-files, that capsulate the complete functionality for one unit. This is not good for us and now I have to see how to work around the bean-logic to hook our Classes into it. Fortunately VisualAp is Open Source and I can do changes, altough I try to avoid it. I could imagine preparing a patch which includes some of my refactorings to make it of bigger common use.

My second work is bit more fun. If I get bored on the one thing, I can switch to this one: designing the unit icons. Of course depending on how I do the implementation of the VisualAp-bridge, the icons may change, but still it's fun trying things with Java2D.