Out with the old, in with the new. I've replaced my fancy old page with this one, which at least has some real new content now :-) The old site is still on Geocities, should you care...   -- Barry R Smith, March 2002

Due to 'popular demand', here it is! Well, not all of it: currently just the first chapter converted to PDF. The images are in seperate files (due to Tripod file upload limit...). Please note, copyright applies to this material.

Chapter 1 p18   p27   p31   p33

This is a homegrown C++ program I am writing, just for fun. The working title is Floorplan Explorer, also known as Flop-X, but I might change the name yet again! Its approaching a stage where its useable, and will appear as a freeware release, including full source. Its written using VC++6 and TrollTech's Qt GUI toolkit (v2.3), which is a fantastic tool by the way. Currently for Windows, it should port to Linux no problem.

Oh, what is it?! Its a simple office planning tool, with a drag-n-drop interface to insert items into your virtual office (click the screenshot above). It can deal with multiple floors, and links between them. Various information about each computer/item (e.g. IP address, software installed etc) is stored. It exports to html, with image maps and links for each item. Its not for state-of-the-art layout, but is especially aimed at producing a nice, easy-to-use web page, e.g. for a company intranet. I'll upload some better samples, and the program itself, as soon as I can. For any info, please contact barryrsmith @ hotmail.com. For convenience, its likely I move the project to SourceForge rather than host it here, but I will post details about that if that happens.

I am also working on a freeware packaging program, using C++/Qt/OpenGL (working title: Boxygen, not to be confused with Doxygen). Its nowhere near release, so I won't bore you with it, except to say its like a poor-man's Quark Wrapture, with slightly more emphasis on producing nice graphics for web pages, rather than the mechanics of the packaging itself. This project came about due to my (real world) job of build engineer, where I occasionally produce graphics of the packaging to use on the web and elsewhere. Quark wrapture itself is good fun to use, so I thought I'd produce a similar (but different) freeware program along those lines. More news when I have it.