First Blog

This is my first blog about the development of Designerator, so I would like to thank all Eclipse developers for the great software they are providing. Without them - of course - I would not have been able to do this.

Designerator is made up of two components, MediaManager and WebManager. The basic idea is that what Eclipse is to the software developer, Designerator could be for the End-user. MediaManager tries to provide the same features as Google Picasa, and is the basis for the WebManager, which I am still working at. Designerator is basically a set of plugins for Eclipse plus the RCP part.

Designerator Open Source

I am not sure how the over all license for Designerator will be, but I have already put quite a few parts under EPL. These are:

Color and Gradient Plugin for Eclipse and Designerator

The major reason to write this was that a direct feedback from the color-chooser, to immediately update the screen, seems necessary for a user friendly software. I guess that I ended up adding Gradient Dialog and a Color-View is just one of those "programmer" things.

ColorView:

Image Processing for Eclipse and Designerator

Image processing is one of my favorites. From my experience image processing works in Java just as good as in C( real speed boost only comes from using SIMD). As we potentially have to deal with 12MP pictures, the Designerator Framework is set to only update the screen image and apply the algorithm after the user has closed the processing Dialog, or save the edits in a xml file for lossless editing. The framework is also layed out to run in parallel threads. The screenshot shows the testing application I wrote to simplify the development process. You don't need to write a Gui, but only provide a configuration Object with the algorithm. All image processing of Designerator is EPL.

Screenshot for Eclipse and Designerator

It is also packaged with Designerator, so you can give it a try right away. Besides from regular screenshots, it crops the screen, takes Screenhots of the active Eclipse View or main composite, and also takes the Clipboard as input. You can save as, quick save with auto-numbering, or open the screenshot in the Designerator image editor.

IconEditor for Eclipse and Designerator

Yes, that is a little crazy. I don't know how I came to write this. First I thought to go for 2-day proof of concept and ended up spending a whole month working on it, because it was too much fun. When I realized that I forgot to implement undo-redo, I had to put it aside. IconEditor is meant to work as simple as XaraX - if you know that excellent graphic editor. It needs about another month of work to be fully functional. Anybody interested?

FFmpeg Plugin for Eclipse and Designerator

It is a complete Front-end for the FFmpeg binary. I have added an almost full featured Jface text editor for the FFmpeg command-line.

Most of the code still needs to be refactored into independent plugins. I don't know how quickly I will be able to that. I am kind of overwhelmed with work right now. If you are interested in any particular part of the software let me know.