Render fast

I used to render UML graphs using the excellent GraphViz—writing out the graphs in dot formatted files by hand as GraphViz doesn’t have any GUI for graph editing. This worked pretty well until I started needing more fine control over the organization and appearance of my graphs. I resorted to ugly dot constructions like

{ rank=same ringbuffer inputproc; }  // put two nodes on the same level

and

buffer_a   [label="buffer"]  // give two nodes the same name

buffer_b   [label="buffer"]

Recently a coworker alerted me to the existence of yEd, an awesome free graphing program written in Java. It creates GraphML-format files using a slick, well-designed interface. It has powerful graph-organizing tools and supports SVG symbols as graph nodes. The graphs look great when printed, too.

WordRecorder was a program I wrote for my friend Matt to help him record hundreds of spoken names for his video e-card site. It’s a pretty specialized program and I doubt more than a handful of people out there will actually have a need for it, but the source code may be of use to people trying to figure out how to use Apple’s CoreAudio Frameworks and the Qt Interface Toolkit.

I’ll try to post more details about its design and how it works in the coming days. For now, visit the main WordRecorder page here.