Homepage: www.nascar.com/multimedia

The lead feature this week on Sun's home page, has been the NASCAR PitCommand applet - a signed J2SE applet that enables racing fans to stay very close to the action. NASCAR's race cars have been outfitted with GPS and other sensors and these real-time statistics are broadcast to a PitCommand applet.

Users can tailor their view of the race to suit themselves, e.g. you can see the advantage of one car drafting another by watching the relative positions of their throttles in the dashboard view. I've been watching a race for a few minutes this afternoon and drafting appears to be very effective. PitCommand is a great looking high performance visualization of real-time data. And you'll have to excuse us for bragging, but this quote says it all:

"Java technology was a great fit with our development needs and the requirements of our client," says Jay Sandhaus, Sportvision's director of Software Development, Media Productions. "It allowed us to develop a full-featured desktop application and deploy it over the Internet. Usually our vision is far ahead of the technology, but Java technology is flexible enough and powerful enough to make PitCommand both appear and behave exactly the way we want it to. This is a huge contrast from the experience we've had trying to force older Web development platforms to perform."

Entrepreneurs take note: this is good business. Users pay NASCAR a subscription fee to have access to PitCommand for the racing season and so far this season 150,000 have signed up. You can try it out for free first, just click here!

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.engineerstoolbox.com

Recently, Michael Seifert, Director Technology at Engrasp, Inc., sent us a note about this nice looking suite of AWT applications: "The EngineersToolbox (ETB) is a web-based software package for mechanical design and analysis. ETB contains an integrated library of advanced computational and reference modules that provide interactive solutions to typical engineering systems and scenarios."

The applications are deployed as applets and are available free after a quick site registration. I have to say that, based on a quick trial run, they are some of the nicest pure AWT applications I've seen in quite some time. If you're a real engineer, point your locomotive at the EBT site and give them a whirl.

.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: jpluck.sourceforge.net

Plucker is an offline web and eBookviewer for PDAs, like Palm and Sharp Zaurus. BlogPluck and JPluck are tools that generate content for Plucker. If you can say: "Plucker BlogPluck JPluck" ten times fast without untangling your tongue, you're way ahead of us here at the Swing Connection. BlogPluck converts web logs in RSS format to Plucker documents. The elegant GUI is based on the Forms and Looks libraries from Karsten Lentzsch at JGoodies. JPluck converts web sites to Plucker documents for offline reading.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.iyeranium.com

JCodeTool is a commercial product from Iyeranium, a small company that hails from New Jersey — former home of yours truly, Bruce Springsteen, and The Sopranos. JCodeTool is a IDE with an unusual focus: it's all about printing, formatting, searching, and visualizing code written in the Java programming language. There's support for working with JavaDoc, displaying class diagrams, exporting the code in HTML or Postscript, and generally taking a document-centric look at Java and XML source code.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.touchgraph.com

Some time ago, we covered three "knowledge visualization applets" and recently we got a pointer to a new one at touchgraph.com. TouchGraph is an open source project and is described as "a set of interfaces for Graph Visualization using spring-layout and focus+context techniques.

Current applications include a utility for organizing links, a visual Wiki Browser, and a Google Graph Browser which uses the Google API." We're not exactly breaking news here, the many impressive apps that have been based on this technology have been featured in CNET and PC Magazine and loads of other publications.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: netloony.sourceforge.net

Lawrie Scovell alerted us to this relatively old (1998/1999) but moderately good looking GUI for remotely controlling, configuring and building Apache servers. As Lawrie pointed out "It's not pretty anymore, compared to what else is out there, but 5 years ago it was a bit of a looker. "

Plus, we couldn't resist an application called "NetLoony".

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: mushaf.diwan.com

Back in 2000, Diwan and Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that they were cooperating to make the Holy Koran available on the Internet. Here at the Swing Sightings column, we're sometimes a little slow about getting the news out, however we've finally got a pointer to this very impressive web-started application.

Although we can't read the words, the text looks great! Adil Allawi, who's a Technical Director at Diwan Software Ltd sent us the following note about the app: "The Quran browser is interesting in that it does nothing other than render text and present a user interface (it even downloads its own font from the servers) - this makes it very small. The full text of the Quran is on a database server that is accessed by the browser and the text is downloaded dynamically from the Internet as a compressed stream. Searches are done on the remote database and results are displayed from the database."

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia

When you surf over to Paul Lutus's arachnoid.com site, which is packed full of custom apps written in the Java programming language, you quickly realize that (after hours of slogging through one corporate web site clone after another) you're not in Kansas anymore. In addition to all of the applications and applets there are links to articles such as "Why is the Sky Dark at Night" and, how could we help but notice, "Boycott Microsoft!".

Aracnophilia is a nice looking WYSLRN ("what you see looks real neat") HTML editor and general purpose web site production tool. JTides is a visualization tool for tidal predictions, SlideProjector is for creating and presenting image slide shows, and DataProspector is a simple database client. All of the apps on this site are "CareWare" which states that instead of payment, the author asks you to "stop whining". I am not making this up.

And I have to admit that it wasn't until now that I finally understood the connection between the Spider words, like arachnoid, and the WEB. Very clever. I am not whining... honest.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.altmobile.com

HTML 4 is pretty much the end of the line for HTML and as of early this year, XHTML became the new markup language of choice for browsers. XHTML is a programmer friendly, XML reformulation of HTML 4. And Mobile Internet Studio is a tool for creating XHTML content. For small devices Mobile Internet Studio also supports XHTML Basic, XHTML Mobile Profile, and the venerable WAP protocol. As you can see from the screenshots below, the tool supports direct manipulation of the DOM as well as WYSIWYG views of XHTML pages.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.squarebox.co.uk/catdv

Rolf Howarth sent us this description of CatDV from Square Box Systems Ltd: "CatDV Pro 3.0 is a commercial video logging and media cataloging application, designed for use by video editors and content producers. It uses Apple's QuickTime technology to provide its media playback and capture capabilities (as a result it is currently available for Macintosh and Windows PCs only), but the cross-platform user interface is written exclusively using Swing."

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: games.donohoedigital.com/war

War! Age of Imperialism is being developed by Donohoe Digital LLC and is an adaption of the eponymous strategy board game from Eagle Games, Inc. In a recent press release that announced that Eagle Games will also distribute the computer game,
Doug Donohoe, founder and president of Donohoe Digital, said, "If War! Age of Imperialism is successful; we plan on making it the first in a series of PC conversions of Eagle's board games."

Here at the Swing Connection, we're looking forward to a whole series of top-notch games created with Java!

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.technoclix.com

Swarraj Kulkarni, the CEO for TechnoClix technologies in India, was kind enough to send us the following description of Gakusei Exp: "Gakusei Exp — is a Japanese language tutor CD with animations for script and Kanji drawings. The script pronunciations are provided with audio files. Many important grammar rules and sentence formation patterns are provided with the help of simple examples in Japanese and explanation in English.There are several chapters with conversations from daily life. Tutor also consists of hundreds of words, self tests, Kanjis and word search facility and many more features. It is the best tool to learn Japanese for business purpose, as a hobby or for career change. The product is a standalone application."

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.sheltermanager.homeip.net

R. Rawson-Tetley sent us a pointer to a rather sophisticated looking app that's used by a number of animal sanctuaries in the US/UK. This GPL'd applications "features a sophisticated animal booking system, together with vaccination tracking, advanced reporting, lost and found matching, animal litter management, a complete diary system, advanced bulk mailling features and some extremely advanced form creation facilities." First app of its kind that we're aware of!

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.kisekaeworld.com

William Miles sent us a pointer to his Kiskaeworld site which, frankly, had us scratching our heads at first. According to the web site "UltraKiss is a computer program that implements the Kisekae Set system (KiSS), a Japanese paper doll system for anime characters."

William pointed out that the system goes beyond paper dolls, in fact "the product is a generalized graphics engine designed for rendering and display of artistic work and implements a specialized event processing language focused on interactive movement and manipulation of cartoon and anime images." For example, one could use it to build an implementation of the infamous FreeCell game. There are loads of KiSS apps out there. Don't miss "Scarecrow Hot Chicken." Really.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.nascar.com/multimedia

The lead feature this week on Sun's home page, has been the NASCAR PitCommand applet - a signed J2SE applet that enables racing fans to stay very close to the action. NASCAR's race cars have been outfitted with GPS and other sensors and these real-time statistics are broadcast to a PitCommand applet.

Users can tailor their view of the race to suit themselves, e.g. you can see the advantage of one car drafting another by watching the relative positions of their throttles in the dashboard view. I've been watching a race for a few minutes this afternoon and drafting appears to be very effective. PitCommand is a great looking high performance visualization of real-time data. And you'll have to excuse us for bragging, but this quote says it all:

"Java technology was a great fit with our development needs and the requirements of our client," says Jay Sandhaus, Sportvision's director of Software Development, Media Productions. "It allowed us to develop a full-featured desktop application and deploy it over the Internet. Usually our vision is far ahead of the technology, but Java technology is flexible enough and powerful enough to make PitCommand both appear and behave exactly the way we want it to. This is a huge contrast from the experience we've had trying to force older Web development platforms to perform."

Entrepreneurs take note: this is good business. Users pay NASCAR a subscription fee to have access to PitCommand for the racing season and so far this season 150,000 have signed up. You can try it out for free first, just click here!

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.engineerstoolbox.com

Recently, Michael Seifert, Director Technology at Engrasp, Inc., sent us a note about this nice looking suite of AWT applications: "The EngineersToolbox (ETB) is a web-based software package for mechanical design and analysis. ETB contains an integrated library of advanced computational and reference modules that provide interactive solutions to typical engineering systems and scenarios."

The applications are deployed as applets and are available free after a quick site registration. I have to say that, based on a quick trial run, they are some of the nicest pure AWT applications I've seen in quite some time. If you're a real engineer, point your locomotive at the EBT site and give them a whirl.

.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: jpluck.sourceforge.net

Plucker is an offline web and eBookviewer for PDAs, like Palm and Sharp Zaurus. BlogPluck and JPluck are tools that generate content for Plucker. If you can say: "Plucker BlogPluck JPluck" ten times fast without untangling your tongue, you're way ahead of us here at the Swing Connection. BlogPluck converts web logs in RSS format to Plucker documents. The elegant GUI is based on the Forms and Looks libraries from Karsten Lentzsch at JGoodies. JPluck converts web sites to Plucker documents for offline reading.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.iyeranium.com

JCodeTool is a commercial product from Iyeranium, a small company that hails from New Jersey — former home of yours truly, Bruce Springsteen, and The Sopranos. JCodeTool is a IDE with an unusual focus: it's all about printing, formatting, searching, and visualizing code written in the Java programming language. There's support for working with JavaDoc, displaying class diagrams, exporting the code in HTML or Postscript, and generally taking a document-centric look at Java and XML source code.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.touchgraph.com

Some time ago, we covered three "knowledge visualization applets" and recently we got a pointer to a new one at touchgraph.com. TouchGraph is an open source project and is described as "a set of interfaces for Graph Visualization using spring-layout and focus+context techniques.

Current applications include a utility for organizing links, a visual Wiki Browser, and a Google Graph Browser which uses the Google API." We're not exactly breaking news here, the many impressive apps that have been based on this technology have been featured in CNET and PC Magazine and loads of other publications.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: netloony.sourceforge.net

Lawrie Scovell alerted us to this relatively old (1998/1999) but moderately good looking GUI for remotely controlling, configuring and building Apache servers. As Lawrie pointed out "It's not pretty anymore, compared to what else is out there, but 5 years ago it was a bit of a looker. "

Plus, we couldn't resist an application called "NetLoony".

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: mushaf.diwan.com

Back in 2000, Diwan and Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that they were cooperating to make the Holy Koran available on the Internet. Here at the Swing Sightings column, we're sometimes a little slow about getting the news out, however we've finally got a pointer to this very impressive web-started application.

Although we can't read the words, the text looks great! Adil Allawi, who's a Technical Director at Diwan Software Ltd sent us the following note about the app: "The Quran browser is interesting in that it does nothing other than render text and present a user interface (it even downloads its own font from the servers) - this makes it very small. The full text of the Quran is on a database server that is accessed by the browser and the text is downloaded dynamically from the Internet as a compressed stream. Searches are done on the remote database and results are displayed from the database."

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia

When you surf over to Paul Lutus's arachnoid.com site, which is packed full of custom apps written in the Java programming language, you quickly realize that (after hours of slogging through one corporate web site clone after another) you're not in Kansas anymore. In addition to all of the applications and applets there are links to articles such as "Why is the Sky Dark at Night" and, how could we help but notice, "Boycott Microsoft!".

Aracnophilia is a nice looking WYSLRN ("what you see looks real neat") HTML editor and general purpose web site production tool. JTides is a visualization tool for tidal predictions, SlideProjector is for creating and presenting image slide shows, and DataProspector is a simple database client. All of the apps on this site are "CareWare" which states that instead of payment, the author asks you to "stop whining". I am not making this up.

And I have to admit that it wasn't until now that I finally understood the connection between the Spider words, like arachnoid, and the WEB. Very clever. I am not whining... honest.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.altmobile.com

HTML 4 is pretty much the end of the line for HTML and as of early this year, XHTML became the new markup language of choice for browsers. XHTML is a programmer friendly, XML reformulation of HTML 4. And Mobile Internet Studio is a tool for creating XHTML content. For small devices Mobile Internet Studio also supports XHTML Basic, XHTML Mobile Profile, and the venerable WAP protocol. As you can see from the screenshots below, the tool supports direct manipulation of the DOM as well as WYSIWYG views of XHTML pages.

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.squarebox.co.uk/catdv

Rolf Howarth sent us this description of CatDV from Square Box Systems Ltd: "CatDV Pro 3.0 is a commercial video logging and media cataloging application, designed for use by video editors and content producers. It uses Apple's QuickTime technology to provide its media playback and capture capabilities (as a result it is currently available for Macintosh and Windows PCs only), but the cross-platform user interface is written exclusively using Swing."

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: games.donohoedigital.com/war

War! Age of Imperialism is being developed by Donohoe Digital LLC and is an adaption of the eponymous strategy board game from Eagle Games, Inc. In a recent press release that announced that Eagle Games will also distribute the computer game,
Doug Donohoe, founder and president of Donohoe Digital, said, "If War! Age of Imperialism is successful; we plan on making it the first in a series of PC conversions of Eagle's board games."

Here at the Swing Connection, we're looking forward to a whole series of top-notch games created with Java!

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.technoclix.com

Swarraj Kulkarni, the CEO for TechnoClix technologies in India, was kind enough to send us the following description of Gakusei Exp: "Gakusei Exp — is a Japanese language tutor CD with animations for script and Kanji drawings. The script pronunciations are provided with audio files. Many important grammar rules and sentence formation patterns are provided with the help of simple examples in Japanese and explanation in English.There are several chapters with conversations from daily life. Tutor also consists of hundreds of words, self tests, Kanjis and word search facility and many more features. It is the best tool to learn Japanese for business purpose, as a hobby or for career change. The product is a standalone application."

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.sheltermanager.homeip.net

R. Rawson-Tetley sent us a pointer to a rather sophisticated looking app that's used by a number of animal sanctuaries in the US/UK. This GPL'd applications "features a sophisticated animal booking system, together with vaccination tracking, advanced reporting, lost and found matching, animal litter management, a complete diary system, advanced bulk mailling features and some extremely advanced form creation facilities." First app of its kind that we're aware of!

(click on the images for larger views)

Homepage: www.kisekaeworld.com

William Miles sent us a pointer to his Kiskaeworld site which, frankly, had us scratching our heads at first. According to the web site "UltraKiss is a computer program that implements the Kisekae Set system (KiSS), a Japanese paper doll system for anime characters."

William pointed out that the system goes beyond paper dolls, in fact "the product is a generalized graphics engine designed for rendering and display of artistic work and implements a specialized event processing language focused on interactive movement and manipulation of cartoon and anime images." For example, one could use it to build an implementation of the infamous FreeCell game. There are loads of KiSS apps out there. Don't miss "Scarecrow Hot Chicken." Really.

(click on the images for larger views)