| Hello again, and iTools [message #52891] |
Thu, 08 March 2007 04:25  |
struangray
Messages: 2
Registered: March 2007
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Junior Member |
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It's been a while, but I have recently started programming in IDL
again. Great to see some old names still posting here, and the new
ones too.
Naturally I wish to save time, effort and frustration. Thanks to
dfanning.com I have reaquainted myself with
device, deomposed=0
but now I feel the siren call of iTools and I am wondering if I should
swim to land or stuff my ears with parsley?
In short: are the iTools stable, usable and extendable enough to make
it worth my while to learn the whole application framework? Are there
any bugs or gotchas that will bite me if I try to build an application
more substantial than simple data viewers on top of the iTools base
layer? I like the provided viewers, but have found a few bugs down
among the details, and I am not yet convinced they are worth the
commitment. I can bang together a basic program from my old widgets
in short order, but most of what I am currently writing will be used
by non-programmers later, and it seems as if a program built around
iTools will be safer in the long run.
Comments?
Struan Gray
Lund, Sweden
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| Re: Hello again, and iTools [message #52982 is a reply to message #52891] |
Fri, 09 March 2007 06:36  |
struan.gray
Messages: 2
Registered: March 2007
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Junior Member |
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David Fanning <n...@dfanning.com> wrote:
> I'll say this, Struan, you are a hard man to discourage! :-)
How hard can it be :-)
> The Worst Journey in the World....
>
> "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest
> and most isolated way of having a bad time which has
> been devised."
If I rememeber correctly, he also said that the pain and
discomfort were vastly outweighed by the camraderie engendered
by mutual suffering.
A bit like this newsgroup...
Struan
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| Re: Hello again, and iTools [message #52984 is a reply to message #52891] |
Fri, 09 March 2007 06:08 |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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Struan writes:
> David, I look forward to buying your book. Please get it written in
> the next two weeks or so :-)
I'll say this, Struan, you are a hard man to discourage! :-)
I've been reading Apley Cherry-Garrard's first person
account of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South
Pole. There was a group of hard-to-discourage men!
Although Cherry-Garrard's account is entitled The
Worst Journey in the World, it is actually full of
hope and inspiration.
I bring it up because the book starts off with this
sentence: "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest
and most isolated way of having a bad time which has
been devised." I keep reading "polar exploration"
as "iTool programming" and I can't help thinking of
you.
Good luck. And, of course, we want to see the finished
product. :-)
Cheers,
David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")
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| Re: Hello again, and iTools [message #52988 is a reply to message #52891] |
Fri, 09 March 2007 02:28 |
struan.gray
Messages: 2
Registered: March 2007
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Junior Member |
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Thanks for all the opinions and advice, even the cricket. I have a
large collection of golden ducks in my personal sporting history, so I
appreciate a game like baseball where you get three attempts at
getting things wrong before they kick you off the pitch.
Live Tools and Insight were the first thing I thought of when I saw
the iTools described in the manual. However, they were so obviously
slow and buggy from the moment you called them up tha I was never
remotely tempted to use them and I could never understand why they
were even included with the IDL distribution. iTools seems different
enough to be tempting, although I appreciate the warnings.
For now I shall probably write my own widgets and pass data to iPlot
and iImage tools for data inspection. There is a lot of built in
functionality that will be very tedious to duplicate, so that's a time
saver for me, especially at the prototyping stage. I am also finding
iTools a useful way to display or preserve internal data from inside
image processing routines when debugging or fine-tuning the algorithm:
IIMAGE, TEMPIMAGE works like PRINT, TEMPVARIABLE as way to keep tabs
on what is going on inside functions and procedures even after they
have returned.
Once I have immersed myself a bit more in the documentation it makes
sense to see if I can get a file reader running, and to turn some of
my eclectic collection of image processing routines into iTool
operations. It looks like a good way to re-use code efficiently.
Michael, your site will be a great help.
David, I look forward to buying your book. Please get it written in
the next two weeks or so :-)
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