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Which path to choose ?

Alrighhtt, I’m back to blogging after a break of 3+ months, I don’t know if people still follow my blog or no, but the last three months has been very eventful in my life, a series of highs and lows, but all is well now :). In this blogpost I will try to sum up in brief whats been going on lately and what are my plans with this blog in the future.

In January 2010, I was in a serious emotional turmoil on what path to choose professionally, I basically had three options

1. Keep working on PyMT till I find a proper sponsor, this was easiest way to follow as the team was great, I had a pretty good hold on the python langauge and PyMT framework. But I was worried that I was hitting a technical roadblock as I knew only python properly , whereas the world of Multitouch has varied interest and I wanted to explore these other fields too.
2. I had an offer from NUITeq. The worries that I had were that the platform was completely new, Purely C++ based. Even the team was new, I didn’t know if I would fit well.  Plus I would have to work remotely due to the visa issues. Other then these it was all good.
3. Quit Multitouch and join a generic XYZ software company in India.

After several weeks of stressful thinking I decided to vote for my technical progress over ease of job and i decided to join NUITeq. I decided I can face all challenges it posed, plus the job offer from NUITeq was very good.

Just when I was all set to begin my new career, I met with an Motorcycle accident. Aftermath: A cracked wrist, surgery necessary 😛 . So I had to undergo a surgery and quit my job plans for next 6 weeks. I gained a metal plate in my hand to hold the bones in place but, lost 6 weeks of precious time 😐 . I’m very grateful to the guys at NUITeq for understanding my situation and deferring the plans till I recover.

My wrist after surgery 😛

Once I joined NUITeq, its all been good for me, I’m really liking the C++ SDK, C++ language in general is awesome. The team is really good, my colleagues help me in every other question or doubt I have regarding the framework. I’m really glad I took the decision of joining NUITeq. Just can’t wait to meet these guys in person sometime in the future :). Its been three months now that I’ve been working with NUITeq, time sure flies when we work on something we really love.

My contract got extended with NUITeq, so I will continue to work with them. Soo now the question is what about this blog. I’ve had several ideas, either I will continue blogging about multitouch coding  in this same blog, or I’m hoping to start another blog focusing only on multitouch coding, the mathematics involved, and other tricks which I’m hoping to share with the community. I was hoping to dwell into Android hacking too and maybe port NUIPaint into c++ using some base framework, he he lots and lots of plans :). So all that remains is to make up sometime for this in the weekends :). Lets see how it goes.

Credits: Crossroads photo by DJ Bass @ Flickr.com

PS: NUITEQ got nominated for Norrmejerier-stipendiet 2010. Please support by voting at http://bit.ly/dnWqsr . It just takes a few seconds for voting process 🙂

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New NUI

Recently I saw a interesting tweet from Seth Sandler regarding a AS3 speech recognition lib. The demo was very impressive. So I wondered why not for python ?. So I started looking around for some premade librarys in Python. I found three good ones

• pyspeech
• dragonfly
• Sphinx from CMU

The first two where windows only solution so they where rejected immediately. The Sphinx library from CMU is very vast library. After some reading I found out that the dwarf version of Sphinx called pocketsphinx is just a plugin for Gstreamer. It was very easy to integrate them and finally integrated them to PyMT. 🙂 . I will be posting the example app as well as Speech Recognition engine for PyMT will be included in the 0.4 release. Can’t wait to see how users will use this new capabilities in their apps 🙂

Other then this i’ve been working on completely rebuilding the animation framework for PyMT 0.4 and its complete now WITH the wiki documentation. Thanks Mathieu for all the advices you gave me in improving this. Heres a video of the app he made with the animation framework.

This one I did.

We are trying our best to release a Alpha version before Christmas, lets see how it goes. Lots and lots of changes and feature additions 🙂

Passed GSOC 09

GSOC 09

Alright this is very old news (One month old). I’ve been a bit busy to make a blogpost. I passed the final GSOC evaluations along with the 7 others of the NUIGroup organizations. It feels great to be one of the several hundred students to complete the program. I really thank my mentors, my elder brother, nuigroup organization and all others who helped me in completing this. Google, thanks for organizing such a great program. This has definitely given me a new way to look at opensource technologies and its organizations.

Right now, I’m waiting for my visa to head up to NUITEQ Sweden. I will be a intern at that company for next three months. “Great people, great envirnoment to work in”, is what i felt everytime I heard about NUITEQ from other people who worked/works there. I’m really excited to be working with them. Thanks Harry for giving me a opportunity to be working with you and your team :). There is even a coffee mug waiting for me there :D. How cool is that…

NUITeq Coffee Mug

NUIPaint 0.1 Screenshots

Here are few of the screenshots of the application.

Initial Screen

Collaboration Windows

Fullscreen Mode

Windows in Fullscreen mode

Layers within Canvas

Filter Application

Comments, Suggestions and Criticisms welcome 😀

NUIPaint Pre Final Eval Report

Being selected as a GSOC student is one of the best thing that has happened to me in life. Not only being selected, but selected as a student learning under the two most admired people by me i.e. Mathieu Virbel and Thomas Hansen was the reason for my double joy. I thought that being a GSOC student will benefit me in getting a better job in the future. Man was I surprised as I progressed through the programme. So in this blogpost I will be summarizing how I learnt new things, altered my previous plans, made new plans to adjust to the schedule.

Phase 1 (Till Midterms)

This OO based programming was pretty new to me. Plus NUIPaint is my first actual application that I have coded. So I had very little idea how to start and where to start? So I set out building the UI as I provided the Mock-ups. But little did I know starting with UI is not a good way of software engineering. Mathieu suggested that I start building pymt widgets first and then integrate them one after another. So this was lesson number one for me “Modular Coding => Better Structure and better to handle”.

In my first phase I built several UI widgets, they are as follows

• Circular Slider Widget
• Circular Menu Widget
• Quarter Circle Colour Picker Widget
• FileBrowser Widget
• Icon Widget
• Tiny Colour Picker
• Toolbars with Background

All Widgets

Descriptions of some of these and how I created them, I have already posted in my previous blogs.

With these widgets plus a simple implementation of layering system, I closed the Phase 1 of the project. So in the next phase I decided to integrate all these and focus on building the application aspect of the project.

Phase 2 (Post Midterms):

So I passed the midterms with the blessings from my mentorsJ, in this phase I wanted to focus more on the application aspects like building the layering system, GLSL filters, Natural Colour Mixing,   smudging, windowing, cut/copy/paste and others.

• Layering System: Layering is one of the most important parts of any painting application. So I had to carefully plan how to build this, instead of directly jumping into coding, so I discussed this with Mathieu, he showed me how a pattern called Facade can be used to achieve this framework. I have finally implemented the following layering structure with Layer Manager being the Facade.  Using layer list manager it’s possible to merge layers, create new layers, multiple layer merge, multiple layer delete etc.  Layer list manager provides an interface for accessing the layer manager.

Layer Manager

One more important feature I have implemented in layering is Layer ordering using gestures. Double tapping on a Layer takes it one level higher than its neighbour. Similarly holding one finger on the layer and double tapping on the same layer with another finger takes it one level lower.

• Multiuser Windowing: There is all provision for multiuser collaborative windows.
  

  Collaborative Windows

• Observer Architecture: Two days back it struck me that instead of passing parameters and parameters of current canvas, current layer manager, current layer etc. It’s much better if there is some entity which always keeps tracks of these things. So I implemented a new Observer Factory. This Observer is global throughout a program. It holds all latest information of various active objects in the system. So if some part of the application wants to know who the current canvas is, he just needs to query the Observer. This really simplified the entire programming routine.

• Copy Cut Paste Architecture: The copy paste system I implemented is a very simple one its basically one class in the each instance of NUIPaint window. It consists of one Data store which holds the copied or cut texture. When pasting this data store is queried for the texture and a new layer is created in the target window. Similarly for cutting, the source layer is cleared after copying the texture of the source to the data store

• GLSL Filters: This part of the project took a really long time to materialize, because I had no idea what GLSL means, how it works. My goal was to implement a separate Filter class, so that any texture can be altered using simple method calls like blur(texture, value), sharpen(texture,  value). So it took 10days+ to understand the basics of glsl and implement 7 simple image processing filters. Following are the filters that I implemented Gaussian, Blur, Sharpness, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast, Black and White, Sepia.

• Natural Colour Mixing and Smudging: I’m still trying to figure out this one, I have a vague implementation now based on Gaussian Blur. Need a better algorithm for this one.

The sheer size of this project was overlooked by me during the initial proposal writing phase and there are several other aspects like focusing on development of reusable widgets for PyMT lead me to have shortage of time. But I’m very keen on continuing this project even after the GSOC, and take it to the next iteration and make it a truly complete pymt app.

As for my satisfaction about this Project. It’s been a really great experience for me, I have learned some really high technical stuff, I feel that now I have a better understanding about how the software engineering process works. And of course I really thank my Gurus(mentors) for teaching me and always being there to answer my questions and clear my doubt.

In my next blog post i’ll post a series of Screenshot of how NUIPaint looks as of now. Cheers!