Sunday, November 9, 2014

First steps with user interface for TILT

One of the key requests that emerged from the BL Labs seminar last Monday (3/11/14) was the need for a usable GUI to control TILT. I wanted something efficient and light-weight that would last more than a few months, so I set about trying to build the GUI using only standard Web-technologies – just jQuery and Javascript – no 'plugins'. My experience with the latter is that, once their creators have moved on, they don't tend to be updated, and are quickly replaced by the next latest fad. Also, learning how to use them, and more often than not discovering half-way through that they are missing some key feature often make more work than just writing your own solution from scratch. So, I thought I would solve the most difficult problem first: how to represent and edit polygons on screen.

What it currently lacks is the ability to add and subtract points. After that is added, I need to make it load the polygons from an entire page of them generated by TILT. But one step at a time.