Since Java 1.5, you can set the default uncaught exception handler:
Thread.setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler( new Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler() {
public void uncaughtException( Thread thread, Throwable throwable ) {
// fill in code here
}
} );
When combined with the JavaMail API, Alice-3 can now submit bug reports on uncaught exceptions and attach things like the stack trace, the system properties, the user’s project, the interaction history… you name it.
Pretty sweet.
Alice and Sun Microsystems to collaborate on Alice 3
We’ve been wanting to share this news publicly for awhile now, so to be able to finally make it official is pretty exciting. As Alice 3 will allow for real Java coding in addition to its traditional drag-and-drop interface, it’s a natural fit for the Alice team to collaborate with Sun. If you’ve seen our first screencast, you may have noticed the use of NetBeans as our Alice-to-Java IDE.
I’m sure Dennis will want to elaborate a bit more this collaboration, so hopefully more info will be provided shortly.
You can also download this video in Quicktime format for offline viewing:
Alice Screencast #2 (54.5MB)
(Right-click and select “Save Link As…” from the submenu)
Alice’s story begins back in the early 90s at the University of Virginia. Randy Pausch, then an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at UVa, started a user interface research group. The Alice system was built to support rapid prototyping of virtual environments. Simulation was performed on a Sun SPARCstation 5 which would send changes over the network to a pair of SGI Reality Engines (one for each eye). One could update the live environment by editing and invoking Python code eliminating compile, link, and reload time. With the cost of changes reduced from minutes to seconds, Alice allowed exploration of the interaction space. The system was itself a publishable result, but more importantly, Alice served its purpose in supporting the development of interaction techniques for this new medium. These techniques, including Worlds in Miniature and Head Crusher, strived to go beyond simply emulating the real world.
Alice is so named because it allowed one to create worlds where things didn’t necessarily behave the way they did in the physical world. As Ivan Sutherland perhaps put it best:
“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.”
– “The Ultimate Display“, Ivan E. Sutherland 1965
You can download also this video in Quicktime format for offline viewing:
Virtual Reality on a WIM (17.7MB)
Dennis, our head programmer and designer of Alice 3, lends his sultry tenor to a 5 minute video demonstrating how to create a simple world in Alice and import it into NetBeans. We hope to have many more of these videos over the next several months as we continue to add new features and make improvements to the system.
You can also download this video in Quicktime format for offline viewing:
Alice Screencast #1 (87.4MB)
(Right-click and select “Save Link As…” from the submenu)
I know a lot of Alice users have been interested in the continuing development of Alice 3. As a result, we’ve set up a blog so our dev team can provide more timely feedback. Whether or not any of said feedback will prove newsworthy, I have my doubts.
