Real-Time Site Analysis - For Android

So, I spent the weekend refining the Android version. Obviously the smaller screen needs bigger finger-sized buttons but, for some reason, this noticeably slowed the redraw rate down. Getting rid of the bitmap backgrounds on all the buttons and panels really speeded things back up, which means that I need to look more carefully at how I apply textures to the interface elements.

Also, apparently the orange and wheat colour combination in my original version was a step too far when I showed it to my wife, so she redesigned both the colour scheme and layout for me in typically architectural black and white.

Touch and Pointer Controls

Touch-selecting and dragging the geometry with a finger works really quite well. However, this is mainly because the blocks are relatively large - I can imagine with small and/or really complex geometry it will become much more of an issue.

I am also vacillating over how to deal with the drop down menus. When used with a mouse (as in the above examples), they act as standard menus - appearing with the first click and disappearing with the second. When a menu is up, you can use the Arrow keys and the Space bar to select multiple different items without the menu disappearing. Mouse selection or the Return/Enter key will close the menu. This option obviously isn’t available in Android.

When invoked with a surfaceTouchEvent(), the menus therefore act more like panels on the right-hand side - staying up until the button that original displayed them is toggled. This allows iterating through the different items in each menu without lots of opening and closing. However, after you know what they all do, it’s a bit painful to have to always manually close each menu after a selection. I tried a touch-drag effect - where if you touch a button, drag down to the required item and then release, the menu closes - but this isn’t at all obvious behavior. More work to do here…

OpenGL Without Bitmaps and Icons

Something else I tried was removing all of the bitmaps and icons entirely, replacing them with actual drawn icons. I’ll need to spend a bit more time refining how these actually look, but you can use the following link to view a fully OPENGL version of the sketch with no bitmaps.

Launch An OpenGL Version

Unfortunately there is a known issue with Processing applets and JOGL on Windows systems with JRE 6 update 21 or higher (Issue 429), which pretty well hits most people who keep their machines up to date. Thus the above link may or may not complain about classes not found or unsigned JAR files and then simply not run. I’ll see what I can do if I have time this next weekend.

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