| More Joy of Widgets (was: IDL vs. PV-WAVE) [message #9258] |
Sat, 14 June 1997 00:00  |
Struan Gray
Messages: 178
Registered: December 1995
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Senior Member |
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Edward S. Meinel, meinel@altair.aero.org writes:
>
> Jonathan Rogness <rogness@NO.sg1.SPAM.cr.usgs.gov> sez:
>>
>> I'd be interested in hearing some of these people speak up, just because
>> I'm curious about how exactly they incorporate widgets into their
>> research.
>
> OK, I'll bite. I started using widgets because I got tired of typing
> lots of commands on the command line. I wrote my own image processing
> widget since no existing program satisfied my needs. Now when I want
> to try a new algorithm, I write a .pro file for the main processing
> and add a couple of lines to the main widget to assign the processing
> to a menu. It has made algorithm development fast and easy.
Ditto here. If I have an idea for something I muck around with the
command line at first but pretty early on I start to construct files
called something like 'temptest.pro' and if that grows so that it has
more than one or two keywords or looks like being something I'll use
on lots of different datasets it rarely takes much time to put
together a widget for the user interface. My only complaint is that
recovering from a bug-induced crash seems much much harder if the
xmanager is running (and 4.01 has some nasty xmanager bugs on my PCI
Macintosh) so functional routines tend to get fairly thoroughly
debugged before I'll call them from a widget.
My widgets tend only to handle interaction with the user, and any
routine that actually does something gets compiled as a seperate .pro
file so that I can call it from the command line should I want to. So
far everything works under the Mac 5.0 pre-release, including the
things that were crash-prone under 4.01 such as calling applescripts
to manipulate the file system.
My only beef with IDL is that - claims to the contrary
notwithstanding - the plotting is not what I consider to be
publication quality. IDL lets me analyse and process my data very
effectively but I always export to programs like Photoshop and the
excellent Mac plotting package Igor when I want to produce a
publishable graphic with good-looking annotations and labelling.
IDL 5.0 does offer better graphics than 4.01, along with a
consistent colour model and much better ways to interact with plots,
but at present it does not offer enough usable tools to stitch
together the low level object graphics routines without a lot of work
by the programmer. Similarly, the overall objects framework is well
thought out and powerful but the current class library is a bit
limited. My feeling is that 5.0 is a big improvement on 4.01 but at
present doesn't offer much more than I could have got by buying some
cross-platform graphics and user interface libraries for a low level
object oriented language like C++. I hope that once RSI have chased
down the worst of the bugs they will start to look at how to save the
user application development time by providing some high-level object
classes for obvious tasks like plotting generalised datasets of
various dimensions. Of course, David might beat them to it :-)
Struan
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