Spheriosity / News: Recent posts

After a 6 month wait the third (and hopefully final) alpha release of Spheriosity has come out! This release packs many new features some of which are:

* Spherical circles
* Better line length measuring
* Easier point and line selection
* Midpoint plotting

and those are just some of the new features! Also, as usual many bugs have been fixed. I would hate to jinx it, but I would argue that this is t he most stable release yet! As usual we are interesting to hearing feedback from this release. If you have some time please contact us either through SourceForge or at: ... read more

Two days ago I finally got around to activating the Spheriosity tracker so if you have bugs, feature requests, etc please feel free to use the tracker! I will be adding all my own bugs to the tracker so hopefully this should make keeping track of these things easier and help me to spot regressions in the code.

The tracker is located at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?group_id=220195

I get automatically e-mailed when something is submitted so I will be able to respond quickly (provided I have the free time ^_^ )

I have been fairly busy this winter break catching up on projects that built up during the school year. I finally finished most of the really critical ones, though there are a few left, such as changing the oil in my car.

This leaves me with a few weeks to work on Spheriosity with. I hope to complete a version I had been working on over the summer because it has been sitting in the repository for some time now. Basically, I just need to fix a few known bugs and update the documentation. ... read more

Currently I have not had too much time to dedicate to programming Spheriosity. Not because I have given up, but because I am very busy with my last year of school. I hope to write some code toward the project during the winter break and post a new version which is currently sitting in the repository collecting dust. It has all kinds of nifty improvements and bug fixes!

The main purpose of this post is just to let everyone know that I am still alive and that the project has not gone stale. If anyone is willing to help develop please feel free to contact me and I will help get you set up!

I took two weeks off from working on Spheriosity. Though, I did do a _little_ work in that time :) Now I am back and ready as ever to get some work done! I'm afraid there's not much time left before I must go back to school where I will have less time for development, but fear not I am not giving up on this project any time soon!

I'm adding this news item to address a problem that one of my friends made quite apparent to me. As some of you have know the way a 'return' or 'new line' is seen by computers is via a special character (or series of special characters). I have been making the main README file in Linux which uses '\n' for return. This means... that when you open it up on a Windows machine it will all be one giant line because Windows uses '\r\n' to denote end of line. ... read more

I am well on my way to implementing the ability to draw circles on the sphere. I actually have the circles drawing and I am in the process of updating the code to make sure circle intersections can be plotted and other improvements like that. You can definitely expect this to appear in the next release of Spheriosity.

I have also found quite a few minor bugs along the way which I have patched. So fear not, Spheriosity is still actively being developed. If you are interested in learning more about development in Spheriosity I suggest you check my blog from time to time as I write about Spheriosity development :) ==> http://jintoreedwine.wordpress.com/category/spheriosity/... read more

Finally I have been able to release the next installment of Spheriosity. Yes, it is still in alpha status, but that is only because I care a lot about the development and do not want to leave
any stone unturned.

I actually consider this build pretty stable, but I am sure there are still a few bugs. That is why I encourage YOU to help me test this latest build! Here are some of the new features:

- Parallel transport
- Point rotation
- Sphere Transparency(experimental)
- Full support for saving files to disk
- Point moving... read more

Sorry to anyone who was hoping to try out the new release right on July 1st. Sadly there were some delays in getting parallel transport working. I have it about 99% functioning as of now and I am currently cleaning up documentation and running tests. I truly hope to be posting the alpha-2 build by the end of this week at the latest.

I will have a large news post about it when I do post it. At any rate I have to get back to working on it. Stay tuned for the latest :)

Well development has been going pretty smoothly with Spheriosity. I am hoping to release the next alpha build (with lots of new features!) at the end of this month some time. I can't provide an exact date as I am still working on the last important feature I would like it to have before the next release (parallel transport).

so far I have fixed a bunch of bugs and gotten rid of a memory leak. That's probably reason enough to put a new build out there :) I will have more details when I release the next build so please check back here at the beginning of July and perhaps there will be a nice surprise waiting for you :D

Well, I finally got my butt in gear and wrote the unit tests in the JUnit framework. I had wanted to write them for some time now so it feels good to get that out of the way. The good news is the unit tests exposed some bugs that certainly would have caused trouble later. The bad news is... the code had bugs :)

Hopefully now I will finish up adding the ability to move points. The next feature I plan to add after that is the ability to place a point ON a line and have it stick when you move it. Since I am not entirely sure how to mathematically implement that feature I am open to suggestions ;)... read more

Now that I have had the time to work on Spheriosity I have added more new and exciting features! Some of which include:

- Allowing points to be movable. This means all lines, intersections, etc. are updated as well when moving a point

- Fixed a bug with removing points and lines which caused intersections to be removed poorly.

I will be posting incremental builds of what I am playing with online at: http://spheriosity.sourceforge.net/spheriosity-alpha.php ... read more

Hopefully this summer I will be able to implement some new features for Spheriosity. Since I have not gotten any explicit requests I will be working on a feature which allows points to be moved. This means that lines will follow a point being moved which should be quite cool. If there are any features YOU would like implemented please let me know and I will do my best to work on adding them :)

Of course if I finished up that fast enough I will find other areas of the program to work on. For instance it could use some nice shiny unit tests.

I am very interested in getting feedback from anyone who has used Spheriosity! I would love to know what you think of it and what you think needs improvement. Please send me an e-mail at: AbinNumber1(at)gmail(dot)com or leave a message in the forums.

I would really enjoy hearing from you. :)

I added another small section to the README file with a link to the small bit of user documentation that exists. Hopefully this is the last change I will have to make to the alpha release. If documentation is a problem please contact me and I will do my best to help until I can get some time to make proper documentation.

I had worked on a small website some time ago and I posted it on SourceForge. It includes a page which explains some of the tools in Spheriosity! I will add a link to the README file in the downloads to include a link to the help page. Right now it is lacking documentation. Then again... it's still in alpha :)

This was an oversight on my part, but when I posted the alpha release of Spheriosity I neglected to leave a README file (other than one embedded in the jar file) so I will repost the application tonight with a README which will have some instructions for how to get it all working!

Sorry for this blunder!

The alpha version is finally up for download! Enjoy :)

While I am waiting for my group directory to get created I figured I'd upload some screen shots. I only uploaded three, but I think it gives a good idea of the interface and what this application is all about.

I am very excited that Spheriosity was accepted to SourceForge. I will be uploading the project as soon as possible.