Re: [swarm-hackers] Probe on Osx ideas!!

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 16, 2009, at 3:29 PM, Nima Talebi wrote:

Thanks Alex :)

Scott - Just a quick clarification to begin with however - Where does Narrative.framework come into it. Scott - you seem to have written a large chunk of this, if not most/all of it.

Nah, it's really the other guy Drew who did all of Narrative, I essentially just got it working under GNUstep.  But you are correct, Narrative is a nice full-featured graphing library, it is very flexible though that also means it has a lot of parameters and methods and such to get a graph displayed.

Right now the BLT library, which is based upon tcl/tk, provides some high level graphs like histogram and so on.  My thought was to write replacements for the BLT using Narrative as the underlying graphing engine.  The idea is to have *simple* graph classes that hide all of the complexity of Narrative underneath, expecting users to use Narrative directly is too much.

If you want a little side project, then I say try reproducing the Unhappiness graph which is in the tcl/tk version of Heatbugs, with Narrative.  I can send you some plotting code that I've used before as a start.

My hope is that we can work on the Probe independently - and that the function of the Probes is purely gluing any compliant interface, to the inputs and outputs of the swarm simulation.

[Probe] <--> [Simulation] --> [Narrative]

When that's complete, and we want pretty graphs, we can start attaching Narrative. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that's about right, though I would characterize Probes more as doing ad-hoc observations and tinkering of the simulation.  For example, in the tcl/k version of Heatbugs, when you click on a Heatbug, it opens up a ProbeDisplay GUI window which shows all of the instance variables of that specific Heatbug, with the capability to change some of values of those instance variables, as well as some nifty drag-and-drop capabilities like dragging a bug to a graph window, and the graph starts plotting that bug's unhappiness over time.

two parts to the probe code, one part is purely ObjC and that part should be okay.  The other part is tcl/tk and is used for the GUI display.

...that "second part" would be the UI into controlling the inputs, and outputs - and _not_ Narrative - Scott?

Secondly, regarding the writing of the new classes to get it all up and running - can you point me to the specific files in the source that you're referring to? - I've never written or even looked at tcl/tk, so I may look and run away screaming, but I'll at least give it a try :)

tkobjc is the directory which has all of the tcl/tk GUI widgets, essentially this is all replaced by OpenStep.  In the simtoolsgui directory is where all of the Probe GUI classes reside.

Scott