NEW: Special thanks to
Manuel Garcia Piqueras for solving the problem with Threads! Welcome to
the OuterDesktop team!
Outer Desktop
Predrag Stojadinović
Media Computing Group
RWTH Aachen University
52056 Aachen, Germany
Predrag@Stojadinovic.net
Introduction
Outer Desktop
is a 3D file browser. Files and directories are represented as planets
in space. Files are sorted by age and type and their size is reflected
in the planets size.
Outer Desktop 1.0 was developed with
Java and Processing. It was thrown together just to get some screen
shots. It is no longer cared for.
Sorting by age is not implemented.
The planets should be ordered from the center of the space starting
with the youngest file.
Nicer thumb textures required. The
ones I made are of poor design since that is not my speciality.
Issues:
I have tryed using SwingWorker in
order to separate heavy calculation of directory sizes from the
rendering but it is unsuccesfull. The program still waits for the
calculations to finish before it displays anything. Thats
unnacceptable. Help is needed for this part, someone who has
significant experience with threads.
The huge differencies in size
between various files/directories is a problem because the tiny ones
become invisible quite fast. Also, really big ones often consume the
little ones because they are too close. I will include colision
detection but that will not be enough. I will try switching from
linear to logarithmic, hoping that will do the trick.
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