Post screenshots of stuff you're working on!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Post screenshots of stuff you're working on!

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UraniumAnchor: May 21, 2006; Not a walrus.

Volte posted:

I wrote a raytracer for a graphics class last year, using Lua to define scenes. I used the Physically Based Rendering book for inspiration (and I adapted their kd-tree implementation) but most of the ray tracing algorithms are the usual simplistic ones found online.

I see your teapot has that exact same weird seam down the middle that fucks up the normals. I wonder how hard it would be to fix that.

(something I did a while ago as part of my own 'raytracer')

# ? Jul 5, 2012 22:59

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:20

The Wizard of Oz: Feb 7, 2004

I've got a bunch of new features in my WebAdvisor Processor almost set to roll out, but the most visible one is this:

This is a whore. That's because these loving things (not what you see, but the original) are handwritten. This pile of poo poo software is so completely incapable of producing a human-readable pre-/co-requisites list that each College/University that uses it has to have some poor person write it out for each course they offer (in fact, I'm quite certain it's a feature of the software; I don't think it's capable of serving the raw rules at all, if they exist). The format varies depending upon College/University, department, or date, and of course there are mistakes or strange behaviour to deal with. So I parse that into an array of the four simple rules that I've identified so far, then bring that back out in a perfectly intelligible, consistent structure that can be reasoned about. I'll need to have a button to turn it off in case they find a department that doesn't work, I don't want to have partial comprehension for something like this.

I think I'm going to reach out to the college to find out just how comprehensively they were hosed by the poor decision to hitch their wagon to this software a decade ago. Maybe I can get a business going selling WebAdvisor victims software to make it slightly less garbage, front and back.

# ? Jul 6, 2012 15:38

Max Facetime: Apr 18, 2009

UraniumAnchor posted:

I see your teapot has that exact same weird seam down the middle that fucks up the normals. I wonder how hard it would be to fix that.

(something I did a while ago as part of my own 'raytracer')

I think it's like half in-joke half tradition by now, if you were to fix it it would most likely just confuse people.

I've been teaching myself programmable shaders but to avoid old API stuff in OpenGL I'm limiting things to OpenGL ES 2.0. Luckily there's lots of examples in the form of WebGL demos. The screenshot is from a Java port of this example which is more about all the uninteresting plumbing that's required to get the API to do something.

# ? Jul 6, 2012 20:09

steckles: Jan 14, 2006

UraniumAnchor posted:

I see your teapot has that exact same weird seam down the middle that fucks up the normals. I wonder how hard it would be to fix that.

(something I did a while ago as part of my own 'raytracer')

The seam is caused by a lack of c1 continuity at the border between the Bezier patches your teapot model was tesselated from. Getting good vertex normals out of Bezier patches is more complex than it appears at first, so it's not surprising there a plenty of crappy triangulated teapots floating around.

Your best bet would be to regenerate your vertex normals from the triangles using a free modeller like Blender or Wings. Alternatively, you could this handy version here. It's higher poly than usual and has a proper interior and removable lid, so it's great for ray tracers.

# ? Jul 6, 2012 21:09

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

My raytracer doesn't read normal info from the obj file (in fact it will break if the obj file has anything other than vertex and face info), and calculates the normal for each face itself. I believe the reason for the seam in my render at least is that there are actually two sets of overlapping vertices at that point, rather than the adjoining faces sharing the same vertices. Thus, the vertex normals along the seam only take into account the face normals of one side of the seam and not the other.

# ? Jul 7, 2012 03:52

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I still need to fix the regex, right now it separates "I'm" to 'I', 'm' which sucks.

# ? Jul 7, 2012 17:17

steckles: Jan 14, 2006

Volte posted:

I believe the reason for the seam in my render at least is that there are actually two sets of overlapping vertices at that point, rather than the adjoining faces sharing the same vertices.

Yeah, that's almost certainly what's happening. No simple fixes for it short of supporting vertex normals in you obj importer unfortunately. I suppose you could iterate through every vertex, find all coincident ones, and record which triangle they belong to, then use that list rather than the mesh information to compute your vertex normals, but that would be slow and a pain in the rear end to implement.

# ? Jul 7, 2012 20:00

Van Kraken: Feb 13, 2012

gmq posted:

I still need to fix the regex, right now it separates "I'm" to 'I', 'm' which sucks.

This is really cool! How does it deal with heteronyms?

# ? Jul 7, 2012 20:10

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Van Kraken posted:

This is really cool! How does it deal with heteronyms?

It doesn't, at least not yet. I'm probably going to add a 'available alternatives for: X' hovertip once it's a webpage.

# ? Jul 7, 2012 20:40

tk: Dec 10, 2003; Nap Ghost

I have been spending my free time writing an XBMC remote for Win8. It's my first real foray into the XAML world, and I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

And since it looks better in motion here is a slightly choppy video: http://wickedsick.org/images/xremote/sa.01.mp4

# ? Jul 7, 2012 23:16

kloa: Feb 14, 2007

tk posted:

I have been spending my free time writing an XBMC remote for Win8. It's my first real foray into the XAML world, and I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

And since it looks better in motion here is a slightly choppy video: http://wickedsick.org/images/xremote/sa.01.mp4

What theme is that? I've been using Confluence but want something a bit nicer and Netflix-esque.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 00:59

tk: Dec 10, 2003; Nap Ghost

kloa posted:

What theme is that? I've been using Confluence but want something a bit nicer and Netflix-esque.

There's no theme/skin involved here. The app uses XBMC's API to grab all the metadata , control playback, etc. The above is just one of the ways I surface the movie library from the app.

Although on the topic of actual XBMC skins, the guys in the XBMC thread are usually recommending one or the other. I forget which one I use now, but I know I found it in that thread.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 04:23

PDP-1: Oct 12, 2004; It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

hendersa posted:

I've been working on an implementation of the original Nintendo Entertainment System on an FPGA.

This is cool as heck, good job so far. I'd love to follow along as it progresses so instead of taking things to PM with individual people please choose a thread here on SA or make a blog or whatever so the rest of us can watch your progress.

The electronics thread might be a good place to go with it, it's fairly active and this kind of work would go over there bigtime.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 06:34

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Just finished a redesign of the 'item' page for my web application. Not quite done yet, not pictured is the change log and major links which I still have to clean up, but I'm pretty happy with the amount of information I've managed to cram into this page without making it cluttered, at least to me anyway.

Most everything is in place edited with AJAX, and for anything heavier and unsuitable for that I use an inline form like on the second screenshot.

Just saw that typo too, ah well.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 12:58

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Wait, is this a mockup or the actual thing? You need some more whitespace, and to use less strange fonts, and to stop abusing different font sizes and colors for the same piece of information.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 15:57

ynohtna: Feb 16, 2007; backwoods compatible; Illegal Hen

As well as agreeing with Suspicious Dish's comments, I'd also strongly suggest that you tidy up all the mismatched baseline and left/right edge alignments. Right now, the layout feels quite higgledy-piggledy.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 16:03

dustgun: Jun 20, 2004; And then the doorbell would ring and the next santa would come

I've had my iOS dev license for 3 years and have only done really stupid, small, never released apps as I play with and learn Obj-C and UIKit and such.
Now I've finally buckled down and am going to release a really stupid, small app as I play with and learn Obj-C and UIKit.

And lo, all I could come up with is a memifier, starting with a Deal WIth It maker that works with the camera or photo roll.

Also I'm looking for guinea piggies: http://tflig.ht/MayrgV

# ? Jul 8, 2012 16:27

Jick Magger: Dec 27, 2005; Grimey Drawer

dustgun posted:

DEAL WITH IT

Sure I'll bite.

Have you considered using/are you using the OS's CIFaceFeature detection for placing the glasses? It only works with human faces, but it's pretty fancy lookin' when your app just does it for you.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 18:26

dustgun: Jun 20, 2004; And then the doorbell would ring and the next santa would come

Yep, I was using face.com's API when online, and CIDetector when offline, but now that face.com is going away, it's all CI al the time.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 18:49

clockwork automaton: May 2, 2007; You've probably never heard of them.; Fun Shoe

Made a little infographic based on the results of my survey. Data here. I'd like to dedicate some more time later to get a true random sample, but it's an interesting early look at the data.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 19:31

Jonnty: Aug 2, 2007; The enemy has become a flaming star!

clockwork automaton posted:

Made a little infographic based on the results of my survey. Data here. I'd like to dedicate some more time later to get a true random sample, but it's an interesting early look at the data.

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to put a sample size like that for a survey that (presumably) didn't use a random sample? Also, I'd have been interested to see the results for a question which asked whether the 18% are comfortable revealing that in their workplaces...

Jonnty fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jul 8, 2012

# ? Jul 8, 2012 19:55

Internet Janitor: May 17, 2008; "That isn't the appropriate trash receptacle."

Jonnty posted:

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to put a sample size like that for a survey that (presumably) didn't use a random sample?

This is what I was thinking. It seems like it would be a really good idea to specify in the infographic that it is a self-selected sample of 808.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 20:23

Null Pointer: May 20, 2004; Oh no!

Internet Janitor posted:

This is what I was thinking. It seems like it would be a really good idea to specify in the infographic that it is a self-selected sample of 808.

This would be good.

I also dug around the citation. I found a 3.7% for the general population, sure. They produced this figure by taking the 'average' (i.e. arithmetic mean) of the proportions from five different studies. Their number answers the question "How many people are gay?" as coherently as a ten minute stream of barking sounds.

You really should find another source, and that source should include a confidence interval.

# ? Jul 8, 2012 21:13

Huragok: Sep 14, 2011

So I started trying to learn more about Simple.Data and decided to work on a pretty solvable problem - SH/SC & CoC job listings. It's a pain to wade through threads and listings are often forgotten about and filled. So I made GoonJobs. Right now, you can advertise a job or advertise yourself for hire and get in contact with the other parties. You can also save jobs for later. Listings expire after 60 days. Newest jobs go up on the front page. There's still a bit of work to be done doing searching by relevence but it's not bad for a few days of work I think.

It uses BrowserID for authentication, Gravatar for profile information and PayPal for payments (wish we had Stripe down under). To prevent spam shittery, I built in a payment/account activation system. The following codes are valid for a free account activation.

2c501d0e0e , 0b8ccebf8f , bd47b4f7d2 , f30016ee8f , 07b973f72a , d09b089ace , 2d1d8a6f89 , b496ca030b , 260dde67ac , 917fcb9546

Not sure it has any merit for job finders here, but it was a good learning experience for me. Criticism very welcome!

Huragok fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jul 9, 2012

# ? Jul 9, 2012 02:00

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Suspicious Dish posted:

and to stop abusing different font sizes and colors for the same piece of information.

Can you explain this comment for me?
The boxed items are tags rather just text, so that's the way I wanted to present them to make that clear. The Usage is a special case in that it is essentially your odometer for an item, and usually used for determining when maintenance is done. Basically once the usage has been updated enough it starts to put a monthly rate next to the amount, so rough predictions can be made.

Contextually it makes sense to me, and in how I'd expect it to be used by end users. Getting everything perfect is unfortunately something I'm (admittedly) not capable of, so I'd rather just get things serviceable so at the very least I can get my foot in the door with this thing.

That said, I appreciate the feedback. In the end of the day if this gets off the ground as soon as is affordable I'd be looking to shore up my weaknesses with a designer and developer and move myself to onsite customer and support, but until then I'm all I've got.

# ? Jul 9, 2012 07:57

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

First of all, pick a less annoying font. Look at the "i" in "information". It's crooked and slanted.

Why are you using two separate colors for "information maintenance"?

Why is there padding on the right side of your buttons for "Engineering" and "Auxiliaries"?

Why is the "500" in "500 operating hours" so huge?

Why is "Westrac CAT" in a box?

Why is there a random red "x", the only use of colored icons, next to "... add rigging info"?

Stop aligning the baseline of your text with some solid color. It always looks awful, especially when you have a letter with a descender. I cannot tell the "j" and "i" apart.

On the "Defer Iob" ("Defer Job"? "Defer log"?) tab, each line has a different alignment. Centered, and then indented left, and then flush left, and then aligned right.

"Defer PM" uses a unique button style, while the rest are links.

I highly suggest you increase your line-height and Google for "CSS grid framework". Use some color in your work, and use font weights, colors and sizes to show a hierarchy of information.

I remember some blog post or slides from a talk by either a GitHub or Twitter employee about the use of establishing an information hierarchy by nested boxes and font weights, but I cannot find it now.

# ? Jul 9, 2012 08:35

Huragok: Sep 14, 2011

Suspicious Dish posted:

I highly suggest you increase your line-height and Google for "CSS grid framework". Use some color in your work, and use font weights, colors and sizes to show a hierarchy of information.

Even though every man and his dog uses it, try looking at Bootstrap if only for its grid system, or even http://960.gs/

# ? Jul 9, 2012 08:55

Impotence: Nov 8, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

If you use SASS/SCSS, take a look at http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/grid.php

# ? Jul 9, 2012 09:36

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

I'm not so keen on most of these frameworks because they insist on putting style into html classes.

I've got a SASS framework I made that I need to get better with, basically in tthe root file I have:

code:

// GRID ESTABLISHMENT

$grid0_unit_count: 16 !default
$grid0_left_margin_ratio: 1 !default
$grid0_right_margin_ratio: 1 !default
$grid0_unit_ratio: 6 !default
$grid0_gutter_ratio: 1 !default

..and then in the layout files I put something like:

code:

@media only screen and (min-width: 600px)
  .application
    section.main
      @include clearfix
      section.focus
        +grid0_region(11,0,0)
        float: left
        margin-bottom: 1.25em
      aside.sidebar
        +grid0_region(5,0,0)
        float: right
        margin-bottom: 1.25em

+grid0_region breaks down to
5 columns wide, 0 columns & 0 columns for its margins.

You can also use
+grid0_region(5, 1, 1, ('padding_left', 'margin_right')) to make the left side padded and the right side margined.

+grid0_column goes inside a region, ie

code:

section.hello
  +grid0_region(5, 0, 0)
  section.sub
    +grid0_column(2, 5, 0, 0)

So there, a 2 column section is created inside the 5 wide region.

The idea here is I can do the whole thing in css, and I'm using percentages so I can scale up. I basically am trying to avoid fixed width design as much as possible. I need to get better about using my own tools though. I'm absolutely rotten at managing horizontal baseline too.

# ? Jul 9, 2012 09:53

Mug: Apr 26, 2005

I just created the ugliest font ever.

But it doesn't look too bad/unreadable when actually in-game (thumbnailed for huge).

# ? Jul 9, 2012 12:27

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

The same could be said for your dev environment.

# ? Jul 9, 2012 13:56

Mug: Apr 26, 2005

akadajet posted:

The same could be said for your dev environment.

Feels good, man.

# ? Jul 9, 2012 14:04

hendersa: Sep 17, 2006

PDP-1 posted:

This is cool as heck, good job so far. I'd love to follow along as it progresses so instead of taking things to PM with individual people please choose a thread here on SA or make a blog or whatever so the rest of us can watch your progress.

The electronics thread might be a good place to go with it, it's fairly active and this kind of work would go over there bigtime.

I've actually PM'd a few folks already that wanted more information. I didn't expect there to be that much interest in the project. I'll have to gather up some information for anyone that would like to see more. I don't know if I would use a thread to cover the progress, since my work is so sporadic that a thread of my own might go a long time between updates. The electronics thread might be a good venue, though. I'll check it out. In the meantime, anyone who wants more information is welcome to PM me and I'll answer questions as soon as I am able to do so.

# ? Jul 9, 2012 14:41

Lumpy: Apr 26, 2002; La! La! La! Laaaa!; College Slice

Maluco Marinero posted:

Just finished a redesign of the 'item' page for my web application. Not quite done yet, not pictured is the change log and major links which I still have to clean up, but I'm pretty happy with the amount of information I've managed to cram into this page without making it cluttered, at least to me anyway.

Most everything is in place edited with AJAX, and for anything heavier and unsuitable for that I use an inline form like on the second screenshot.

Just saw that typo too, ah well.

Hire / befriend a UI designer. As Suspicious Dish pointed out, there are a lot of usability issues in there. UI / UX is something everyone *thinks* they can do because great UI looks so "obvious" once you see it. Getting there is very hard, and takes training, experience, and some natural intuition (much like good programming.)

# ? Jul 9, 2012 17:30

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

I wouldn't go that far. Get a book on UX/interface design, look up the common elements of interface design, etc.

A big issue is that I cannot find an established hierarchy. You seem to be using size to establish hierarchy, but "Active" is bigger than the device itself. It's also not aligned to anything else. The "500" is also as big as the device itself, if not bigger.

Think about drawing a set of nested boxes: you don't have to actually have borders on the real page, this is just a skeleton to establish the layout. Something has to "own" each box, and the children of each box should be related to the owner in some way.

The most important information you want to show should be near the top of the hierarchy.

Have something I whipped up in three minutes in Photoshop:

# ? Jul 9, 2012 18:56

excidium: Oct 24, 2004; Tambahawk Soars

Even using a baseline like Twitter Bootstrap to establish consistency would go a long way.

EDIT: For an example check out http://www.fleetio.com/ It's pretty similar to what you're doing except exclusively for vehicles. You can register a free account to take a look at the UI design, but it's much cleaner and clearer and uses the Bootstrap framework.

excidium fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jul 9, 2012

# ? Jul 9, 2012 20:13

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

This is what I ended up with, after the 48 hour BlazeJam. It's an infinite runner about a fireman saving kitties.

As it stands, the alpha there will become part of the BlazeJam bundle, which goes to anyone that donates $5 or more to the BlazeJam fund raiser.

I'll also polish it up and turn it into an iOS/Android game, over the next month or so. I'm hoping to use it to generate some additional donations for a few of the harder-hit local fire departments up in Fort Collins (figuring on donating half of all revenues to them, split equally).

First thing to go - that loving font. I am so bad at picking fonts. That one happens to have a "minor" bug wherein its kerning is broken to hell and back, meaning if you D O N ' T T Y P E L I K E T H I S the letters overlap. :argh:

Shalinor fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jul 9, 2012

# ? Jul 9, 2012 21:35

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Lumpy posted:

Hire / befriend a UI designer. As Suspicious Dish pointed out, there are a lot of usability issues in there. UI / UX is something everyone *thinks* they can do because great UI looks so "obvious" once you see it. Getting there is very hard, and takes training, experience, and some natural intuition (much like good programming.)

Yeah, this isn't really an option. As I've said earlier, I don't have enough to pay for anyone to work for me, and spec work is the devil. Thanks for the advice and the feedback, especially yours Dish. It highlighted alot of breakdowns in what my intentions were and how it was interpreted.

Some days I hate being self taught.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jul 10, 2012

# ? Jul 9, 2012 23:04

Lumpy: Apr 26, 2002; La! La! La! Laaaa!; College Slice

Maluco Marinero posted:

Yeah, this isn't really an option. As I've said earlier, I don't have enough to pay for anyone to work for me,

That's why I added "befriend" =)

Post in the Web Design thread... myself and others do quick UI reviews / recommendations in there all the time.

# ? Jul 10, 2012 00:14

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 21:20

excidium: Oct 24, 2004; Tambahawk Soars

Maluco Marinero posted:

Yeah, this isn't really an option. As I've said earlier, I don't have enough to pay for anyone to work for me, and spec work is the devil. Thanks for the advice and the feedback, especially yours Dish. It highlighted alot of breakdowns in what my intentions were and how it was interpreted.

Some days I hate being self taught.

There's always the option of looking at website "themes", especially those of the admin variety. Might be able to fit your work into one of those for pretty cheap ($20-$45 range).

# ? Jul 10, 2012 00:48

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Post screenshots of stuff you're working on!

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