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Lire development: a big next step ..

While it has been quiet for some time around Lire, recently development has been pushed forward. I switched to SVN for development and integrated simple RGB color histograms as a feature for comparison with the MPEG-7 features. Savvas Chatzichristofis (or on facebook, his image search engine) contributed the CEDD feature, which works great! Marko Keuschnig and Christian Penz contributed implementations for the Gabor texture feature and the Tamura texture features, where the latter is already in the SVN. I also integrated the new features in LireDemo. A new version – already compiled – can be downloaded here: liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk16.tar.bz2 Note that Java 1.6 is required.

Caliph, Emir and Lire development switched to subversion

Today I did something I should have done a long time ago: I switched (within sf.net) from cvs to subversion. Now login, update and commit are much faster and development gets easier. If you are interested you can browse the repository here: http://caliph-emir.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/caliph-emir/. If you want to check out and get the code, then you can find the documentation on sf.net.

NetBeans 6.1 Released

The new NetBeans IDE 6.1 has been released 2 days ago. Changes are more incremental than fundamental, but it features now support for JavaScript and code completion for JavaDoc. Furthermore support for MySQL has been added. Release notes can be found here.

Image Mosaics with Ajax

Did you ever think image mosaics in a web application are something that can only be rendered on server side? Well a very interesting post gives an example for the generation of image mosaics with JavaScript and Ajax. The authors employs a JavaScript binary file reader and uses the raw values from greyscale BMPs to find the mosaic. The approach for mosaic creation is simply yet effective: The overall luminance of an image is taken as “single value descriptor” and single pixels are substituted by very small BMPs.

Related Links:

• Ajax mosaic builder – The blog entry describing the Ajax way of mosaic creation
• Lire Demo – The offline way for image mosaic creation (also featuring colored images and formats different from BMP)

Computer Games: Parallax Scrolling & Sprites

Currently I’m preparing for giving my talk next Friday in the computer games lesson on multimedia issues in games. To underline my words and slides with some code I also coded some easy little Java program visualizing sprite animation and some star field background. The coding was great fun – the third scrolling shooter I coded … always a pleasure

However there is one thing I found out while coding: Ready to use sprite animation image stripes are hard to get. There is a little tool called simple explosion maker” that came handy and the SpriteLib of Flying Yogi is rather cool, but I miss the great deal of online creative commons content. Perhaps one could point me there

Related links:

• Simple explosion maker – A simple tool for rendering explosions.
• SpriteLib – GPL-ed sprites of Flying Yogi

Java SE 6 Update 10 Beta – A Desktop Release?

Java has been around a long time now and had a lot of success – at server side at most. Issues that still wait for being solved are discussed with each release, one of them is desktop integration. Swing is nice – at least since NetBeans integrated the Matisse GUI editor – but has looked awful for a long time. With Java SE 6 update 10 Nimbus found its way into the Java SE: Nimbus is a vector based look and feel and can therefore support many resolutions in arbitrary steps. Furthermore it is claimed that it is D3D accelerated and therefore a lot faster than standard L&Fs. That was interesting enough for me to take a look at the beta release

In the middle of below image you find the Nimbus theme, surrounded by JGoodies Plastic (on the left) and the standard XP one on the right (a click on the image reveals the full resolution version). What I found out is:

• Nimbus takes a lot more space, there is more empty space in between combobox items, etc.
• I didn’t manage to remove all borders from buttons, as can be seen in the top button row with white background.
• Focus and progress is painted nicely, it looks appealing.
• the menu items in nimbus look strange in combination with the icons, the gap between icon and text is too small.

My new EEE PC

With some luck I grabbed an Asus EEE PC – a white one, the last in stock – at the Saturn market on Wednesday. As I always wanted to own a subnotebook my expectations were quite high, but I have to say: I’m impressed! The EEE comes with a whole lot of software (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kontact, Konqueror, … even Java JRE 1.5) and can be customized without end. I installed several games, the VLC media player and the Opera browser, which works really fine with the page zoom feature.

On the photo you can see the EEE along with my PSP. This shows how small this thing is. Also the weight is impressive, but best of all: It can decode MPEG-2 (DVB transport streams) and H.264 without dropping a lot of frames. That’s really cool as the CPU runs only at ~ 600 MHz.

While my colleagues are already queuing to do some multimedia tests I’m looking forward to testing the Java capabilities of this device. Full 1.5 mobile java runtime … sounds great to me

Computer games lecture update: Industry talks

As already blogged we offer this semester a course on computer game development at Klagenfurt University. Now three industry talks are confirmed:

• Stefan Berger from  JoWooD Productions Software AG will talk about game development projects discussing aspects of conceptual work, project management specifics in game dev industry, resources, marketing and QA.
• Andreas Olipitz from OSIOS Online Platforms GmbH will talk about multiplayer games on the browser platform. OSIOS develops such a multiplayer game: Project Deep Space.
• Microsoft will also send a speaker and has sponsored an XBox for the best student project.

All the talks as well as the presentation of the students projects will take place on June 20, 2008. If you are somewhere around Klagenfurt and you like to join us (without being enrolled) drop me a mail in advance

This years JavaOne is coming …

Last year’s JavaOne had 15,000 attendees so there’s a number to reach and exceed 2008 JavaOne takes place May 6-9 in San Francisco and covers virtually every aspect of Java. Especially interesting is in my opinion th Open Source tracks as Java is really strong there (compared to the open source portfolio offered in .NET/C# and the portability of libraries in other languages). I wish I could go there but I’m chairing another interesting event here in Klagenfurt at the same time.

Related links:

• 2008 JavaOne Conference Homepage 

QT Jambi: Deployment and Web Start

I’m still having this strange idea to use QT Jambi one day for a Java project of mine Jambi is a pack of Java bindings for the QT framework. Therefore one can use the QT GUI classes from within Java and need not to rely on the Swing, AWT or SWT toolkit. As it maps to native code it is also expected to be faster than Swing or AWT. Like QT it can be used for GPL based open source development fro free.

While the demos look fine I had some doubts regarding the applicability for deployment. Jambi definitely relies on the QT libraries, which – not surprisingly – depend on the target platform. So different pre compiled libraries have to be included for different platforms. For the open source windows edition the whole pack has 26.4 MB (compressed < 6 MB), which is not more but a reasonable addition compared to the size of a standard JRE (compressed < 20 MB). A minimal set for using the GUI (core, gui and mingw) has about 17.3 MB.

So my conclusion: It’s definitely usable. While you cannot create QT applets with Java, web start is possible. However if in a specific scenario – especially web start – size matters then you need think about compression (e.g. with jars).

Related links:

• Jambi reference documentation
• Jambi application deployment documentation