SURFER user interface

project

SURFER user interface

Status

Open

How to participate

Contact the author of SURFER.

Website

SURFER at IMAGINARY

Credits

  • Programming
Christian Stussak
  • Design
Christoph Knoth
Partners/Sponsors: 
Klaus Tschira Stiftung

SURFER is a program for visualizing real algebraic surfaces. The user interface is primarily designed for exhibitions. It does not offer advanced options for more professional users. In addition, its implementation is based on the JavaFX 1.3 framework which has been abandoned by Oracle in 2010. In order to continue development on this wonderful program, the user interface needs to be rewritten using a different user interface (UI) toolkit.

New user interface

The successor of JavaFX 1.x is JavaFX 2.0, which seems to be a long term perspective for the graphical UI. This might also be combined with different ways of interacting with the program. A good example is FormulaMorph, which uses physical controllers instead of touchscreens. Any ideas are welcome.

 

Additions to the user interface

Once SURFER has an up-to-date user interface, one can go further and include new features like LaTeX-based equation rendering or the possibility to create short movies of deformations of surfaces. There should be different UI modes for exhibitions and home usage. The latter one has to allow to set surface parameters, colors etc. precisely in addition to options for tweaking the visualization algorithm implemented in jsurf which may fail for complicated surfaces if the default settings are used.

Required skills
  • User interface programming in Java: JavaFX or something with similar capabilities
  • Alternative input/output devices: whatever is needed to implement your ideas
  • Movies: Toolset for creating and dealing with them in Java/JavaFX

Files