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