Wednesday, December 24, 2008

QuickHandNote - A note-taking application


I'm a digital tablet user and I love tablet PC's. When I was a Windows user, OneNote was my tool of choice. Now, using mainly Linux and Mac OS, I have to say I have not found something similar. So, I decided to develop my own tool: QuickHandNote.

QuickHandNote is a project which objective is the creation of a notetaking application especially designed for teaching purposes, thinking overall in electronic whiteboards, digital tablets and tablet pcs.

I have developed it using processing with Eclipse. Actually, this project is an experiment about the real possibilities of processing in the development of real applications.

You are invited to test and cooperate: http://sourceforge.net/projects/quickhandnote/

It will be fantastic to receive suggestions or bugs. At the sourceforge site of the project, you can find a tracker, called 'Bugs', where you can post any suggestion or bug of yours.

I have tested it in Mac OS, Linux and Windows. The only drawing tool is a handwriting one, but I'm preparing now much more. The results can be saved in a XML format file and can be also exported to PDF.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

An introductory course to processing.org

I've been teaching an introductory course to computer graphics for some years. The subject lectures are taught in one semester (2 hours per week) and with fifteen laboratory sessions of one hour.

From this year on, I have decided to use processing as the framework for the laboratory sessions.

The experience has demonstrated the many advantages of processing in this field. Students are able to work from the very beginning and the introduction to the different topics is seamless. Students do not spend too much time in learning development environments, initial code templates, languages or tools that are only interesting for educational purposes.

Everything that students develop can be reused, improved and is able to be part of a final application. The level of complexity is gradual, from just writing some sentences of code to C-like programs (a collection of functions) to complete object-oriented applications.

Based on Java, with a comprehensive graphic library, inspired in PostScript and OpenGL, and thousands of users, processing is a serious alternative to other approaches. With its use, I have managed to cover more computer graphics topics in our laboratory sessions, to help our lectures at the classroom and to capture student interest in a more effective way.

You have the complete slides of the laboratory sessions I have prepared in this website.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Try Augmented Reality on-line !

In my profile, you can see a photo of mine I took using ARToolKit.

Based on ARToolKit, at Boffswana web-site, you can enjoy a complete example of an AR application based on optical tracking without having to install anything.

It's really very funny and easy to use (if you use a Mac, read the instructions carefully).

The example was developed using FLARToolkit which, at the same time, is based on NyARToolkit (a Java/C#/Android ARToolKit wrapper without native code).

An example with myself again: