Eclipse Sketch

After some period of inactivity, I’m now (finally) conducting my PhD research on Sketching Recognition here at Louvain Interaction Lab (Belgium), and my goal is to make Eclipse Sketch a repository of my contributions to that field. At this point, I’m ... [More] requesting sketches from you out there. If you are engaged on interactive systems development, [...] [Less]

There is an article called Trainable Sketch Recognizer for Graphical User Interface Design from A. Coyette and others showing an approach to recognize pen-made sketches based on Levenshtein distance algorithm for string comparison. The article talks ... [More] about recognizing elements of user interface such as buttons, combo boxes and windows, when they are sketched by a [...] [Less]

Good news, the Sketch project was finally created! You may find it at http://www.eclipse.org/sketch Although some improvements and refactoring are taking place right now, the API is already usable if you would like to pre-alpha-test it. Me, Chris and Mariot have decided to go for Git as the version control. We are a fresh new [...]

There’s a long time since i’ve blogged about the FlexiTools’2010 workshop and the discussion about a flexible graphic representation made possible in Eclipse graphical editors. Here we talk about creating an intermediate element which holds a ... [More] flexible graphic representation, in opposition to it’s canonical one (which in GMF is defined at .gmfgraph model). The users would [...] [Less]

I’ve just submitted a position paper to FlexiTools’2010, in which me and Simone outline our ideas for the Sketch API, which i’m carrying on with Chris and Mariot. Take a look at the paper:SKETCH: Modeling Using Freehand Drawing in Eclipse Graphical Editors The main idea is the approach of the modeling task as a twofold process [...]

3 weeks ago Sketch API proposal became official. Meanwhile, our job is to foster community around the project. This project is intended to be applied to any GEF editor, and since that there are so many GEF-based graphical editors out there, our goal now is to try to define a common set of functionalities between them. [...]

Pen-based/Tablet technology it’s been around for a long time, but recently this ‘touch-oriented interaction’ has been gaining more attention, with all the buzz around iPad. So if we’re starting to interact to devices with our hands, we are not clicking anymore — perhaps our interfaces should start to be less click-oriented? How can we take [...]

What if I give to GEF editors the ability to recognize sketches, using the Levenshtein algorithm, which is easy to implement and its also fast? Instead of clicking on the palette, the user just select the Free Drawing Tool and sketch freely on the editor. A given layer could recognize the points and add the relative [...]