Dialog Designer now has a forum

Graham's excellent Dialog Designer now has an online forum. You can join here.

If you are not familiar with Dialog Designer, you should try it out. It is a very slick tool that lets you build GUIs in Magik with a drag-and-drop interface. All the difficult GUI generation code is stubbed out for you and you can focus on building the engine/database behavior.

You can read sworldwatch blog posts about Dialog Designer here.

And it is open-sourced by iFactor Consulting so you have free access to the product! You can read more on the product page here.

Temporal Imagery Comparison Technique

I was recently made aware (thanks Minfeng) of a cool infographic put together by ABC News in Australia showing a slick interface for comparing two pictures of the same location. You can see the pages here and here. In this case they are using the overlay technique to allow users to evaluate the impact of the Brisbane flooding by comparing aerial imagery taken before and immediately after the flood event.

The imagery comparison technique was so compelling to me that I thought I would see if I could do it in Magik. My scenario was to use imagery available via Web Maps Connector to compare imagery supplied by Bing with imagery supplied by NearMap. What I came up with was a class called a canvas_comparer. It could be used to take two snapshots of the same canvas with different contents and then easily compare the two snapshots dynamically as sliding overlays.

This video demonstrates how it works. I'm wondering if there are other temporal-type applications that this might work for. (I threw this canvas_comparer together in about 1 hour using Graham's very cool Dialog Designer. If you haven't tried the tool yet, you should!!).

Dialog Designer 2.0 now available

For some time I have been posting an update each time a new version of Dialog Designer has been released. Version 2.0 has now been released. You can find the announcement at the iFactor Consulting blog. From now on, if you want to be notified of Dialog Designer updates, please read or subscribe to the iFactor Consulting blog.

Happy New Year!

Dialog Designer 1.9.5 now available

Graham Garlick at iFactor Consulting has uploaded v1.9.5 of the open source Dialog Designer. You can get the latest version by browsing to http://www.ifactorconsulting.com and clicking on the "Download Version 1.9.5 Now..." link.

Here are the release notes for 1.9.5:

- create additions/changes sub-source directories for core code modifications

- bug fix (statusbar progress indicator element XML generation/parsing)

- exposed :allow_filtering? attribute for a tabular_list

- fixed statusbar rendering of multiple springy panes

- fixed window_pane rendering

I did not do a post for 1.9 so here are those release notes as well:

- added messages tab (define messages to support user-written code)

- fix issue where module.def 'requires' section was not updating

- various bug fixes, all minor.

- added recordset_gui_component widget

- added numeric input widget

- added 6th example dialog to the Help Document

If you have not used this tool, I would highly recommend it. You can create your GUIs without using this tool, but there are so many parameters to be aware of. Using this tool essentially allows you to incorporate known (and sometimes unknown) tips, tricks, workarounds and best practices from one of the best Magik coders around and put it into your own application.