Projecting a logo

[james]

you are being delusional.

as you've seen in this very thread, there are others who find laserboy unusable due to its interface.

Much of what you wrote in this thread is pejorative to my art and to me personally.

[absolom7691]

That doesn't give anyone else the right to trash me or my work in open forum.

I don't think it's from a standpoint of trashing. I think it's more exasperation with the fact that you don't add what a lot of people have asked for. If it's because there's a lot of work behind it and you simply don't have the time, fine but if it's because you just don't want to because "long live the TRS80", that is another thing. When new users come in looking for a low cost solution, you're there to push Laserboy (nothing wrong with that) but the learning curve is massive. To someone new to lasers, it's a bit of a mood killer. Point, click, display... every LJ can get behind that. You mentioned Inkscape earlier. I use that in conjunction with my laser cutter but it was a huge learning curve. Now imagine if that was all CLI? Reminds me of the days of making a picture using PSET.

[absolom7691]

Much of what you wrote in this thread is pejorative to my art and to me personally.

You see it as art, users see it as a tool. If a tool is difficult to use, you find another tool. This is coming from someone who has stripped many a bolt using vice grips instead of just using a better damn tool! These are suggestions to make your software a better tool to use.

[lasermaster1977]

"I love making things. It makes my heart, spirits and enthusiasm lift with joy and gratification from doing so. My favorite thing is to build a four story building with toothpicks and sawdust. Toothpicks are very easy to find, use and even easier to manipulate with the hands without any special training. Sawdust? If one cannot understand the importance of having sawdust available for use as a binder with just a small modicum of effort, then they are...well, a lost cause. Glue is what holds the whole thing together, any glue, white glue works best but rainbow glue is almost the equivalent. What else is there to say."

I wonder who said that?

[james]

There is a difference between painting a house a different color or moving it 6 inches to the left. It feels like a console application because that's how it began its existence and that's how the whole thing is internally constructed to work. So now it is a hybrid of cli and high resolution graphics display. Instead of printing text and accepting input in a console shell, it does that into a bitmap inside a window. If I tried to recreate it as a gui, it would not work the way it does now. It would be a completely different app. It does almost everything as an incremental step. That corresponds with a key tap. Trying to simply replace every key tap with a mouse click in a menu, that takes at least a mouse click to find would make it unusable. A tap moves an object a specific distance to the right. Three taps is exactly 3 times that distance. A shift tap moves it the exact distance back to the left. Same as rotate, or scale or many other incremental steps. It can only give you a relatively low resolution 2D raster view of typically only one frame at a time. The user must imagine that all of the other frames exists in the memory object. They are in 3D space that is orders of magnitude higher resolution than what can be displayed even on a 4K screen. The reason it can do so many things that few if any other laser apps can do is precisely because it is fundamentally different to the core. The reward for the effort of a high learning curve is knowledge, understanding and abilities.

[swamidog]

everything you've just said could be accomplished with a gui. what you've described sounds like a cad app or vector graphics editor.

There is a difference between painting a house a different color or moving it 6 inches to the left. It feels like a console application because that's how it began its existence and that's how the whole thing is internally constructed to work. So now it is a hybrid of cli and high resolution graphics display. Instead of printing text and accepting input in a console shell, it does that into a bitmap inside a window. If I tried to recreate it as a gui, it would not work the way it does now. It would be a completely different app. It does almost everything as an incremental step. That corresponds with a key tap. Trying to simply replace every key tap with a mouse click in a menu, that takes at least a mouse click to find would make it unusable. A tap moves an object a specific distance to the right. Three taps is exactly 3 times that distance. A shift tap moves it the exact distance back to the left. Same as rotate, or scale or many other incremental steps. It can only give you a relatively low resolution 2D raster view of typically only one frame at a time. The user must imagine that all of the other frames exists in the memory object. They are in 3D space that is orders of magnitude higher resolution than what can be displayed even on a 4K screen. The reason it can do so many things that few if any other laser apps can do is precisely because it is fundamentally different to the core. The reward for the effort of a high learning curve is knowledge, understanding and abilities.

[james]

everything you've just said could be accomplished with a gui. what you've described sounds like a cad app or vector graphics editor.

Maybe you don't understand or care but SDL2 is a multiplatform game development api. It doesn't do anything more than give me a window and the address of the top left pixel. It also gives me keyboard events and a precision timer fufunction That's it. Everything you see on the screen is created in a bitmap memory object and mem-copied to the window pixel address. Even the 8x8 pixel font and the ability to print into the bitmap is my code. I had to figure out how to make it visually work like a console overlaid on the raster representation of the vector space. Everything LaserBoy does is in my code. The first version that only ran in Linux used the standard console for text in and out and the vector image was drawn directly into the video card ram using an api I wrote called ezfb. It's not like I can just jack a whole bunch of someone else's code in there to give me all the typical gui wigets.

[swamidog]

i do understand... and i understand that there are gui toolkits for SDL2.

you don't want to do it because you don't want to do it. that's fair and a much more honest answer than saying it can't be done and it's perfect the way it is.

Maybe you don't understand or care but SDL2 is a multiplatform game development api. It doesn't do anything more than give me a window and the address of the top left pixel. It also gives me keyboard events and a precision timer fufunction That's it. Every thing you see on the screen is created in a bitmap memory object and mem-copied to the window pixel address. Even the 8x8 pixel font and the ability to print into the bitmap is my code. I had to figure out how to make it visually work like a console overlaid on the raster representation of the vector space. Everything LaserBoy does is in my code. The first version that only ran in Linux used the standard console for text in and out and the vector image was drawn directly into the video card ram using an api I wrote called ezfb. It's not like I can just jack a whole bunch of someone else's code in there to give me all the typical gui wigets.

[james]

It's my art. I wrote nearly all of it from the ground up. When it only ran in Linux, the only thing I didn't write was the kernel and the command shell.

I really don't want to write Windows from scratch.

I am very thankful for what SDL2 does for me. That is precisely as little as possible to make it run exactly the same in almost every OS.

.

[polishedball]

Just face it Chris. It's not the interface or the keyboard layout that keeps you from using it. You are way smart enough to deal with that. It is 100% attitude.

But why use it when there are tools available to do the same job with much more user friendly. I loved Oregon trail, Zork and many more, but that is now to remember about the old times not where I would go to get a job done or be entertained now. While the price point of lasers has come down, purchased software is not that much (own beyond, LSX, LaserOS, Modulaser, and a couple more), they do everything I need in a few simple clicks.

The last time I tried laserboy was for ADAT conversion and it constantly crashed (32bit limit on files) I am guessing this is fixed now with the 64bit port, but beyond frame files overscanned that optimize for 60K if wanted and distributed scanning seem to give me the best flicker free image up-converting old ADATs. Can Laserboy convert the frames for multi-projector playback and shift scan rate? If so I might be tempted to to try the interface again. It would be cool to be an ILDA file and not pango frames. That to me is the biggest benefit to software not proprietary.