We are on the move like an idea who's time has come

to quote the great man himself.
We have a phd student who looks super cool and a nift programmer coming all the way from America starting as soon as possible. I have a really cool idea about the whole thing.

More OU junk

I have a constant distress over the internal communication process of the O.U.

Take today I had an email in my inbox with clicked on a link which went to a website that downloaded a word docuent that had a text that had pratically no formatting and so could have easily been embeded in the text of the original mail.

I think what I find distressing is that this has ended up with a large number of copies of a random worddocument on many people's harddrives for no reason whats so ever.

I've emailed them to add to my collection.

What is SSR more OU terms

SSR is Student Support Review

"The project team for this review asked faculties and student services to set up modelling teams to investigate various propositions, so our team has done some modelling."

Makes you wonder what this means ?

I provide the acronyms as I uncover them as a servce to other OU people.

Currently thinking about large screens again

Had and intreasting chat int the group about how to do an experiment. I had the idea of an alien reactor that needed controling.

Paul pointed out that a number of screens on a wall arre just one large screen with dark lines. To be multi screen implies that they are not in the same orrienation.

I need to clarify my thoughts on this - I'm going to make a large multiscreen and single screen demo to help refine our thinking on the matter.

Ever though how little help there is for direction manipulation interfaces?

A Component Framework for Direct-Manipulation Editors

Ever though how little help there is for direction manipulation interfaces?

If you want to write an on form to fill in it is easy to use a dialog box. BUT if you want to say have something that gets dragged or selected you have to go to a much lower level ( mouse down ,mouse up and so on).

it struck me as very strange that you can get a standard tree component but not a direct maniuplation component. Strange that both the PC and the Mac have a 'finder' - a direct file manipuation program.

You might expect that this should be included in any basic GUI tool kit and I wonder why not.

More strangely most of the standard GUI systems have a Drag and Drop - the interaction of direct manipulation between two applications mostly the finder/file system with an application. So you get fragments of a direct manipulatoin tool kit but not a frame work for the whole thing.

Why not - is it hard to do why am I expected to build my own draggng icon application but not write my own button class. Is it some kind of programming problem or is it cultural ( i.e programmer cultural) ?

As I pointed out to Paul this is important - Direct manipluation turns up in an number of good applicatoins (iMoive,iTunes, graph editing applications, drawing programms, 3D programs ) but it is the life blood of tangables and table top interfaces. If there is some usablity reason why you should NOT make a tool kit for direct maniplation then we need to know what it is and why shareable interfaces look like they will be highly direct manipulation.

Intreasting software failure

Odd thought. I'm looking for an algorithum which will do a convex hull algorithum on a set of data points I wanted to create in my data set. I've done a search with google and found a few very hevery weight system and a few examples. what is intreasting is I cannot use any of them. I have code already and this is strutured in a particular way. This makes deriving my code from one of the hevey weight systems difficult or impossible. You know they will have some complex build process and lots of 'utility' class that will have to be loaded up not to mention the inheritance problem. the smaller examples are just rough code outlines sutible for examples but not final versions.

So my quest to use a previously written package is thrwated.

I guess the only thing to do is to create something which works as a component and can be added simply to something else - an intreasting exersise if I have time.