Here are some ideas on expanding partiview: (KIRA group) >> what shoudl we call us: manybody group starlab group kira group 1) extra windows Probably the most prominent thing our group has been talking about (and partially implemented) is some sibling windows (e.g. the HR diagram) to aid in visualization. Some of these ideas are in a way very similar to Dynamic Queries (e.g.http://www.astro.umd.edu/~teuben/aips++/ddq.ps) and xgobi (http://www.research.att.com/areas/stat/xgobi/). 2) command line interface The command interface to partiview is something that grew out of needs. For beginners it is often a bit confusing to see two types of commands: data commands and control commands. But we could change this command interface to one of the currently popular scripting languages, such as Ruby or Python. Ideally to shield ourselves from progress (e.g. when a new language comes around) we could use SWIG (swig.org) . >> i'd like to put a hypethetical code snippet here. 3) remote operations Sort of like a client server, it would be nice if partiview could be instructed to sit in a mode where it also listens asyncronesly to events, and external agents can then do things. Perhaps some of this 'need' will go away if we have a python-like scripting language, since they come with this. The example in the manual how to make animations is one place where i encountered this. Another example could be to use partiview to view in real-time the progress of a simulation, and allow the user to interact with the data while it's being integrated. - $Id: ideas1.txt,v 1.2 2002/06/03 02:56:05 pteuben Exp $