The MathMap Composer

[mark....@gmail.com]

Hello everybody!

I've just pushed the newest feature of MathMap on the public Mercurial
repository: The MathMap Composer. It's like Yahoo Pipes or Quartz
Composer, but for MathMap. Here's what it looks like:

http://mathmap.googlegroups.com/web/Composer-Prototype.png

Yes, it's (still) ugly, but that'll hopefully change.

What you can do with MathMap Composer is combine MathMap filters via a
simple GUI - no code writing necessary. The screenshot shows the
combination of five filters: The input image is first put through
"Droste", then a "Radial Mosaic Bertl Edition" and a "Desaturate" are
applied, and the result of that is combined with the output of the
"Droste" by a "Wobbly Transition". The result of that is then finally
"Lomoize"d.

The Composer doesn't do any new magic - it just produces a MathMap
filter which you can examine (and modify and save) in the Expression
tab. There's also lots of stuff it can't do yet. Some of that
because the new callable filter system isn't fully functional yet (for
example it can't use any filters which take colors, gradients or
curves as inputs), but most of that because it's not implemented in
the Composer yet. I think it's pretty useful already, though.

Here's a quick description of how it's used: Click on any filter in
the tree view of the Composer tab to add that filter to your
composition. You can drag your filters around in the Composer as
suits you best. Link the output of one filter to the input of another
by dragging either from the output slot (the yellow circles are the
slots) to the input slot or vice versa. To remove such a link, simply
click on the input slot end of the link. Click on the red box in the
upper right of a filter to remove that filter. The Composer generates
the filter that's bright blue (the one you clicked last). Usually
you'll want that to be the one where all the links end and which
doesn't link its output anywhere else, i.e. the one "on the right",
but you can select any filter in the "middle" of your pipeline to see
the intermediate steps.

There's probably still lots of bugs. Please report them here if you
run across any.

I'll put together a small library of simple filters that will be
useful in the Composer, like the traditional Porter-Duff compositors,
stuff similar to Gimp's layer modes, brightness/contrast stuff, size/
translate/rotate, etc. You are of course all invited to
contribute :-)

When I've got that together I'll make a 1.3.1 release and create a
screencast, to try to advertise the Composer to a wider audience.

Have fun!

Mark

[Owen]

Hi,

I wonder if compiler_types.h and new_builtins.c are meant to be in the
mathmap manifest. Just that I couldn't make without them.

Anyway it seems to be working ok, I just have to learn how to drive it


Owen

[Mark Probst]

On Jan 12, 2008 9:00 AM, Owen <xem...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder if compiler_types.h and new_builtins.c are meant to be in the
> mathmap manifest. Just that I couldn't make without them.

No, they're not supposed to be in the manifest, because they are built
from builtins.lisp and ops.lisp. You'll need CLISP installed to do
that automatically (if you use Debian or Ubuntu just do "apt-get
install clisp"). It should also work with SBCL, but the Makefile
doesn't support that, so you'll have to do it manually, like this:

bash# sbcl
* (load "builtins.lisp")

Mark

--
Mark Probst
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/schani/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/schani/
http://schani.wordpress.com/