Developer Stories: Manuel Lopez Shares More About His Portraits With Craps Application
Manuel Lopez started using Delphi in 1997. He presented a showcase entry (A Fantastic Portrait Program From Craps Dice Is Made With Delphi) into the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we talked to him about his Delphi mastery. More of his application Portraits With Craps on his website. When did you start using RAD Studio/Delphi and have long have you been using it? I started using Delphi from the version, which was presented in 1995 in Orlando, Florida, at the Borland conference at that time. Over time I used versions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, the latter being the best in my opinion. There were new versions but I did not test them. I got funding for an academic project and bought the Seattle version. Without a doubt, the development and evolution of Delphi represents an extraordinary work. Being able to program with practically the same code for Linux, Mac Os, Pc and Android makes it, in my opinion, one of the best RAD development tools. I had the opportunity to go to more than one Borland convention. There I met David I, one of Delphi’s most enthusiastic programmers. Later, I even had the opportunity to interview Anders Heilsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal and the Delphi compiler. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio/Delphi? The idea of visual and non-visual components makes programming much more effective. The fact of dedicating more to solving the problem that we have already using components that do the routine tasks, is without a doubt one of the most attractive things about Delphi. In addition, for years Delphi has maintained the open source philosophy and there is a lot of source code, components and tools, which can be used very easily. For my PhD thesis I developed a program that uses a series of open source components that solves a significant number of problems for the results I needed to obtain. How did RAD Studio/Delphi help you create your showcase application? Portraits using Craps is a program that creates images with dice. In May 2020, I wrote about a dice image created by cyber artist Barbara Lynn Helman. Apparently the creator put the dice according to the shade of gray that she visually found in each bit of the image. The photographs he submitted seem to indicate this. However, visually making a box made with dice like this would have been too complicated a task and probably too easy to make mistakes. I want to assume that Barbara used some program that told her which die to put in which position. This would be, in any case, the smart way to do this task. So I wrote a program that precisely generates images with dice, like the ones Miss Lynn Herman does. In fact, the program is a modified version of other software that I wrote (for a Digital Image Processing university course), which allows making images with halftones, which seeks to simulate shades of gray for printing black and white photographs (see Computer Graphics. Principles and Practice in C, James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, John F. Hughes, Addison-Wesley, 1995; chapter 13.1.2 Halftone Approximation). I quickly got a program that generated the final images, putting virtual dice (dice images), instead of putting real dice on a […]
