On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 06:10:54PM +0200, Elliott Bignell wrote:

Hello, Nicu,

Thanks for the clarification. My feeling is that even if nothing is expected, something is due. I closed the company due to limited sales and am now only developing HeadCase as a hobby and marginal source of income, but it is still technically a commercial app. I may in fact go Open Source to breathe some life into the project, but I invested a great deal of perspiration in it and effectively admitting that it will never make me a living is a painful step! Still, I feel that it is unique enough to be worth saving and Open Source could be the way. Just for your information, it is a Windows-only app written 98% in C++ using ATL COM with a thin VB wrapper, is largely undocumented and in a few areas in need of serious refactoring, and was created with the best of object-oriented intentions but has in a few places sprawled! It will need tidying up.

What I could perhaps do is open the evolutionary algorithm and associated picture-creation objects for re-use, perhaps in Inkscape, and perhaps with help adapt it to write SVG files for the archive?

That'd be a wonderful way to make a contribution. There's a couple different ways it could be integrated into Inkscape: One is to add the code to inkscape itself, which would make it fairly easy to create GUI dialogs and so forth for the user to set options. The other is to implement it as an extension program, in which case it distinct from Inkscape itself, but can be used with Inkscape. In either case, I think this would be quite handy in Inkscape, and I'd encourage you to investigate it further.

Presently, Inkscape is getting ready to do a release, and it'll be a month or two before it's back to a state where brand new features can be added, but I'm guessing you'd want a bit of time to rework things anyway?

Bryce