www.hans-eric.com

I’m back from my three week vacation!

I had a great time, but as suspected I wasn’t able to stay away from computers. In the warm evenings, just for fun, I started to implement a ray tracer in the D Programming Language.

I have been looking for a suitable project that would give me a chance to get deep into D, and a ray tracer seems to be the perfect fit. D is supposed to be great at floating point programming and now I have the chance to find out on my own.

To make it a little more interesting I have used a more top-down breath-first kind of approach than I normally do. I want to see how that affects a test-driven development technique. As a part of the experiment I keep a detailed development log which I plan to share with you when I reach a certain point. It could be within a week or take several months depending on work load and inspiration level.

So stay tuned. I’ll be back with ray tracing, or other topics that comes across my sphere of interest.

Cheers!

I stumbled upon this really interesting site. It implements a new kind of site navigation that is really cool. It’s actually a research project that tried to create a user interface which requires no clicking.

For me it was a mind-tumbling experience, but I quickly got a hang of it. I even liked it to some extent. I had two major problems with it though: First there were a lot of movement going on. A little too much for my old fashioned taste.

The second and more important problem was that the mouse pointer got in my way while reading. In a normal click-based interface I could just drag it out of sight, but here I needed to have it hovering over the item to keep it enlarged. This was annoying, but they should be able to reduce the problem with more whitespace around the enlarged items.

I haven’t tried the interface enough to come with a deep analysis, but my guess is that it won’t replace the traditional click-based navigation. At least not in the near future.