PhET Progress Report

Sam Reid

August 23, 2007

An online version of this report is available here.

Here’s a pie chart representation of the time distribution.

I have switched to a part time appointment for the Fall semester.

Rotation

· Click here for latest version

· Worked with John to simplify and generalize charts & record/playback

· Added profiling information (frame rate display)

o Useful in other performance intensive sims as well?

· Performance improvements (on my development machine, 19 frames per second in version 16 to 37 frames per second in version 29)

o Pretty slow on Dubson’s test machine, as of 1.03.28; version 1.03.29 hasn’t been tried yet

· Worked with Chris & John to identify and resolve rendering issues; some of this work should be applicable to other graphically performance intensive sims.

o Needs cleanup and generalization.

· Charts & data structures need some more work on refactoring

· More performance improvement is possible, but more difficult (highest benefit-to-cost ratio finished)

· Remaining Work

Torque

· Click here for latest version

· Fixed characters to stay on the platform during inner/outer radius change

· Added applied friction force model & graphic

· Aligned sliders in control panel.

· I think this now has all features requested in the design docs

· Some minor bugs remaining; e.g. subscripts on in-chart readouts should be removed

· Needs thorough testing

Lasers & MRI

· Latest versions for Lasers and MRI

· Increased threshold window for absorption

· Switched graphical indication from (target energy level flashes OR transition graphic flashes) to non-flashing representations.

· Changed legend items & tab titles

· Added pretty tabs to Lasers (cost 100kb, but I was able to remove 200 kb elsewhere, for a net decrease in download size of about 10%)

· Let’s choose a consistent representation for a matching energy and use it in both Lasers & MRI

Other

· Obtained permissions for spot from ITS

· Received translation for Japanese greenhouse

· Made full-field arrows fully opaque in Radio Waves

1. Were other things also supposed to become opaque here?

· Discuss remaining After AAPT Ideas?

CCK

· Cleaned up code

o Removed unused phetgraphics implementation, now using piccolo only

o Cleaned up initialization for Japanese

Upcoming Work

· Rotation/Torque

· Licensing issues/Meet with Kate Tallman

· GUI for translation system

· CCK