Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Line Style Editor

I'm just finishing up a project at Chief Architect, the small software company (also the name of their flagship product) where I'm working this summer. It's been a wonderful experience working here--the work day flies by, so I figure that's a good sign--and having a blast in design and programming. My recent project has been a line style editor:


What's a line style? If you draw a line in Microsoft Word, you can choose a set of line styles like dashed and dotted, but you can't customize them or anything. Chief Architect is a CAD (Computer Aided Design) tool tailored for home design, and a fundamental CAD tool is lines. Engineers and architects want a whole array of line styles (dash dot dash, dash dot dot, little-dash long-dash little-dash dot, dot dot dot dot little-dash dot, water line, power line, A/C, etc etc). My little editor here allows you to edit and create them from scratch. Anyways, I've had fun with it. Under the hood it's over 1000 lines of code. Didn't take long to get the basics working--it did take long to get all the intricate details and making it compatible throughout the system.

As I'm writing this, there's lighting flashing and thunder cracking all around me here in Post Falls ID. Sometime I'll have to take a picture the falls, which is literally across the street from Luke's and my place.

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