This note’s for you

Yesterday I received a 20$ donation for my old program Xebece, a nice little tool for visualizing large sets of information. That is really nice. It made me hack on it again immediately (you see, I’m completely reward-driven ).

I was really shocked when I looked at all this code. It’s only 3 or 4 years ago when I wrote this, but man, did I write crappy code back than. And I remember I did it with the best effort to actually produce good code. Duh. On the other hand, it’s really amazing what I learned in all this time. Most of this can be credited to my work on GNU Classpath (which I actually started because I wanted Xebece to run on a free Java platform).

There’s still many ideas floating in my head for Xebece, when I find some free time *cough* I gotta implement:

• An abstraction for the tree view, to allow alternative renderers. More specifically, I’d like to re-introduce the hypertree library. The first versions of Xebece (actually, Ontographics back then) where written against this library, but removed in favor of Prefuse because the hyperbolic tree rendering is patented in the US. However, I think it is the superior renderer, it is GPL just like Xebece and I’m a co-maintainer of this project too, so I have more control over the code (yeah yeah). OTOH, Prefuse is some BSD license (the version in Xebece is actually the dreaded 4 clause license with advertising clause which actually makes it non-free, but it seems like they changed it to a free 3-clause BSD lately, together with reworking all of the API to be completely incompatible with my code, hrmpf).
• Throw out the weird text/image blocks on the right pane, and replace it with a simple HTML editor. Same practical purpose, but much more straightforward to use (I hope).
• Allow interconnecting links from one tree node to another (which effectively makes the tree a graph), possibly augmented by special URLs in the HTML pane.
• Speaking of URLs, using a HTML editor would also allow external web URLs in the information panel on the right.
• Easy to use Applet export which would create an applet bundle out of the current project for simple uploading on a webserver.

Phew, quite a lot of ideas. And most of them were floating around for 2 years already and I never got around to implement them. Let’s see how far I get now.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.