Projects

Descend

mimec — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:43:46 +0000

Descend

mimec 2017-10-05

Descend is an open source program for drawing 3D surfaces from parametric equations. It uses a custom, very fast language called Misc to calculate the geometry. It also uses OpenGL to render scenes with high quality shaders.

The idea of the Descend project dates back to the 1990s when I had an Amiga 1200. One day I saw a very simple program which could draw 3D surfaces based on parametric equations entered by the user. One of my first attempts to create a similar program was called “Monster” and I wrote it in Turbo Pascal on my friend's PC as a computer science school project.

In December 1999 I bought my first own PC and just a few months later I started working on a program called Grape3D, which was based on a similar idea, but it was written using Visual C++. It had very a complex user interface for designing scenes consisting of multiple objects. Unlike its predecessor, I could also render these scenes in real time using 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics.

Later I made a few attempts to design a new version that would be even more powerful, but I never made any real progress with it. Finally in 2004 I decided to take a completely different approach. I designed a programming language called Misc, which could be used for very fast calculations using vectors and matrices. Then I started experimenting with building a new program for drawing 3D graphs, named Descend, that would be based on the Misc Engine. However, I was never satisfied with the results and finally I abandoned this project.

In summer of 2011 within just a few days I created an entirely new prototype of Descend which used an adaptive surface tessellator to dramatically improve the quality of generated surfaces. The result was very encouraging, but the JavaScript engine which was used to calculate the parametric equations turned out to be too slow. I decided to revive the idea of Misc, but this time I kept it very simple and I focused on optimizing the performance. As a result I released the first and only official version of Descend in October 2012. It's much more of an experiment than other open source programs that I created, but I still think that Descend was one of the most interesting projects that I've worked on and I learned a lot from it.

Link

Descend website

Fraqtive

mimec — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:39:03 +0000

Fraqtive

mimec 2017-10-05

Fraqtive is an open source, multi-platform generator of the Mandelbrot family fractals. It uses very fast algorithms for maximum performance and generates high quality anti-aliased images. It allows real-time zooming navigation within the fractal and dynamic generation of the Julia fractal preview.

The history of Fraqtive started in 2001 when I created the first simple Mandelbrot fractal generator in just a few days. At that time I was working on another project called Grape3D, and at some point I got interested in fractals, so I decided to create a simple program just for fun. Initially it was called “Fractive”, from the words “fractal” and “interactive”. Shortly after finishing Grape3D I decided to return to this project. The fractal generation engine was already quite good, so I focused on the user interface, which was written in MFC. At that time I published my first open source component, which was an MFC control for editing various properties that I designed for Fractive. Unfortunately, I did not publish the program itself and some time later I lost its entire source code because of a hard drive failure.

In 2004 I was assigned with a programming project for the university, and as I didn't have any better ideas I decided to revive this project. This time I wrote it using the Qt framework so I changed the name to “Fraqtive”. In January 2005 I officially released the first version. Shortly after I decided to integrate Fraqtive with KDE and it became a part of the collection of open source applications called “KDE Extragear”. Thanks to that, Fraqtive became quite popular at that time.

I returned to this project again in December 2007 and I started working on a completely new fractal generation engine. It was based on the same very fast algorithms but supported multi-core processors, the SSE2 extension and more formulas than just the plain Mandelbrot. I also rewrote the entire UI again, this time using the Qt 4 framework. I released a few versions in 2008, gradually adding most of the functions that the original KDE version had.

In December 2012 I added a function that made it possible to generate a series of images that could be used to create a video. I also published a few fractal zoom animations on YouTube. In January 2015, I added an option to use multi-sampling when generating images which significantly increased the quality of the resulting animation. I also published another video generated using the new algorithm which had higher resolution and much better quality than the previous videos.

Link

Fraqtive website

WebIssues

mimec — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:16:03 +0000

WebIssues

mimec 2017-10-05

WebIssues is an open source, multi-platform system for issue tracking and team collaboration. It can be used to store, share and track issues with various attributes, description, comments and file attachments. It is easy to install and use but has many capabilities and is highly customizable.

I started creating a prototype version of WebIssues in 2005 as my master's thesis. The main goal was to create a simple team collaboration system which consisted of a client application written in Qt and a server written in PHP. The prototype was very limited compared to today's version, but many core concepts remained almost unchanged since then.

In 2006 I decided to continue working on this project and create a version that could be publicly released. I decided to rewrite the client application using KDE libraries, because at that time there was no open source edition of Qt for Windows, except for a very buggy unofficial port. After a year of development the program had all basic features implemented, including filters and the issue history view, and slowly started gaining some popularity in the open source community.

In 2007 I ported the client application back to Qt because I wanted it to be available for both Linux and Windows platforms and Qt 4 officially supported Windows. The transition took some time but I also cleaned up the code and made various improvements. I introduced some new features and a redesigned user interface. The project started to become quite popular and there were many feature requests from the community.

At some point it became obvious that I cannot keep adding new features without redesigning some of the core architecture. Also, although the desktop client was one of the main strengths of WebIssues, web applications were becoming much more popular and I realized that a web client for WebIssues was also very important. Finally in March 2009 I decided to start working on version 1.0 of WebIssues. It took me a huge amount of time, but finally in December 2011 it was ready for release.

Soon WebIssues became even more popular and I received a lot of very positive feedback from the community. Although I was a bit burnt out with this project and I started working on other things, I kept adding new features from time to time and two years later I released another major version, 1.1. At this point WebIssues became very stable and mature and since 2013 I only made minor fixes and changes, even though I still had some plans to release version 1.2 at some time.

In the meantime, the world of web applications changed dramatically. Even my own team started using more modern tools such as Trello for project management and we only kept WebIssues for bug tracking. I knew that WebIssues still had great potential and with some “face lifting” it could be a very powerful tool again, but I also remembered how long it took to create version 1.0 and I realized that I have other obligations these days which make it harder for me to work on large open source projects like this. However, in June 2017 I started experimenting with the first prototype of version 2.0 and I have plans to release something new in 2018.

Link

WebIssues website

Saladin

mimec — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 16:39:05 +0000

Saladin

mimec 2017-10-05

Saladin is an open source dual-pane file manager for Windows which merges the capabilities of Windows Explorer with the well known and easy to use orthodox user interface. Saladin supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.

The idea of writing my own file manager came to my mind in the first half of 2010. I had been using Windows 7 for some time and I couldn't find a free file manager that would suit my needs, work fast and reliably and support 64-bit Windows Shell extensions. As I already had some basic knowledge of the Windows Shell API, I started experimenting and decided that it shouldn't be difficult to create a file manager which would only be a thin front-end for the Shell API, supported by the Qt framework.

I came up with the name Saladin a bit later and it was obviously a pun related to Krusader, which is an excellent dual-pane file manager for Linux. Despite that I was already working on the version 1.0 of WebIssues at that time, I decided to dedicate some time to Saladin and around September 2010 it had enough functionality that I could start using it on a daily basis.

The first version of Saladin which I released in 2011 was quite limited, but I kept adding new functions and releasing new updates once or twice a year until 2014. At that time it became quite popular, but I stopped working on new features as I didn't want it to grow too big and complicated. It started as a very simple but useful tool that just does its job and I wanted to keep it that way.

On the other hand, as I was still using Saladin every day, I had an ever growing list of little things that were missing. Also, when I started using Windows 10, the user interface of Saladin started to look a little bit outdated. Finally in February 2017 I decided to start working on a new version, and my friend, Łukasz Grabowski, committed himself to creating a new, modern set of icons. After a few months of work, in May 2017 version 1.0 was officially released. Although I'm not planning to add any more major features at the moment, I still have a list of small fixes and improvements and I will most likely keep releasing some minor versions in the nearest future.

Link

Saladin website