Posts Tagged parasol

It's now been about a year since I first started work on Parasol. In the process, I had to learn about UI programming in Common Lisp. It pains me a lot to say this, but it is definitely not one of the great strengths of CL. It certainly wasn't back then, and it still isn't now. Since Parasol started I learned a lot about Qt and in particular the Common Lisp bindings, CommonQt. While using Qt is your best bet at writing a native GUI, it just isn't as pleasant as writing other lisp code. Too many things can break, too many brick walls are laying in wait for you to hit your head against, too many things are simply not there infrastructure wise. However, as Parasol grew, and I grew tired of CommonQt's shortcomings, I started to write more and more systems to work around these problems and make the UI experience for the developer a better one. This is the goal of Qtools.

Usually when we talk about optimisation of data structures the concern for optimisation lies within the operations of adding, updating, deleting, and/or retrieving. I've never really heard of any algorithms or data structures that try to optimise traversal. After all, if you have n elements, how can traversal be anything but O(n)?

I'm not writing this because I actually think I have much to say, but rather because I want to slack off from working on Parasol. In particular, I'm dealing with internals related to getting things actually drawn. Computer graphics in general have always been a huge headache area for me, so it's no surprise that I'm not having much luck with Parasol either in this regard. In order to minimise the pain, I've laid out a small plan of action for this.

It's been too long since my last entry. I just haven't had much that I felt safe talking about. But, now that I'm mostly done with everything that occupied me for a while (Radiance and Purplish), I have more time available for other things. One of these things happens to be Parasol.

In an effort to get at least something productive done today I decided to take it upon me to talk a bit about my latest project, Parasol. I've attempted to write large GUI oriented applications before, but they never really went anywhere significant. This time seems to fare much better already though, as Parasol has, within barely a week, evolved into a tablet painting application with layers, history, infinite canvas and fancy colour pickers.