Learnings & Experiences

The release candidate (build 660) of VTK Designer 2 is out. With this we have incorporated the suggestions received during the betas. Plus, standard things like undo/redo, recent files, panels etc work. Plus, with this RC we have included a draft copy of the user manual, so users must be now able to get started…

I read this really interesting article on Software Engineering.

I am pleasently surprised by the feedback I have been getting on the second beta of VTK Designer 2. The feedback is pushing the product to better usability and adoption. Meanwhile we are gearing up our efforts for a new website for VTK Designer 2. Hope everything will converge by the end of this month…

One of the users of VTK Designer, today wrote to me an email that he used VTK Designer to provide some basic training on OpenGL and VTK. He even sent me some pics.. This intro was given as a part of FOSS Teachers Training Program at GEC, Chandkheda. It is really nice to see so…

The second beta release of VTK Designer for Windows (Build 609) is now available. We have announced the availability of the beta on our website also.

Both my talk proposals were rejected this year :(. The reasons given for both of them were valid though. The talk on “VTK Designer” was rejected because it was already done last year. Valid point.The talk on GCF was rejected because it was too specific. Valid point again. The FOSS.IN team is really doing a…

I just uploaded GCF 1.0.573, here is the link: http://vcreatelogic.com/oss/gcf/index.html. The uploaded GCF is updated from the version I had sent for the contest. I have also updated the documentation a bit. I hope the new documentation makes better sense than the old one.

“Generic Component Framework” the foundation on which VTK Designer 2 sits, won the 3rd place in the QtCentre Contest. When the finalists were put up I practically gave up because the other entries were mature projects while GCF had about 2-3 months of effort (I had sent GCF build 102 for the contest today we…

Enabling haptic transformations is so simple in VTK Designer now. All you have to do is to set some properties for haptic actors in your scene; and you are ready to go !. See how it works in this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRC9BpXec7s The script was pretty simple and small !

We have managed to get the PHANToM Omni working with VTK Designer (and VTK ofcourse) using SensAble Technology’s Open Haptics toolkit. They have some some pretty amazing work. Making VTK work with the haptic device was not all that complicated. We just had to read a bunch of materials (read documentation, sample code etc) and…

Unfortunately the vendor of the hardware device I bought last week does not support Windows Vista. So I had to switch back to Windows XP Professional. It sucks, but then I really did not want to blow away all the effort (and money) that went behind getting the device just because of an OS problem.…

Highly inspired by Microsoft Office, I created a very simple menu widget for VTK Designer and called it “Menu Strip”. No, it is not similar to ribbon, although it is inspired by it. I am getting mixed feedback from friends, users and colleagues about it. Lots of work left before it can be called polished.

Twenty three days and a couple of thousand dollars later, the hardware device arrives :). Anyways, I have to clear some more hurdles before which I can actually begin to use it. a) I need a 15A switch and not the 5A switch that I have in the office at the moment :(. So I…

“Best penalty kick ever! 😀” on Google Video It’s funniest penalty kick i’ve ever seen!