The earlier portion of this week was spent working on the ethics assignment for this course and analyzing my project from an ethical lens. After that, I implemented more of the UI diagram from my previous status report into our GUI python application. Some details have been omitted while some will get added towards integration stages, but here is the current bootup view:
You might be able to tell that last week’s application view that I showed was running on MacOS while this week has a Windows style app window. Since the app will be designed for Windows, I have been making the effort to continue my initial development on Windows. Also, I left out the fast forward and rewind red arrows and replaced them with forward and back, to give the user a measure control. FF and RW just didn’t make sense for the accompanyBot. The only UI I have not developed was the measure display and the slider. This should be simple enough especially in comparison to the rest of the features that were intended for next week which I will detail below in this post.
Another change made, was utilizing the PIL library for image resizing as opposed to pygame’s internal resizing function. Now image quality is very much retained while displaying the music score in the application. Since I am at the stage where I will be implementing UI changes while also adding integration components, I decided to introduce one piece of functionality. In particular, the import pdf/png button now works upon a click. Initially, I had planned to use a python module for displaying a GUI of importing a file but I realized that this would get very computationally expensive and if it were to run in the foreground then the user would not be able to perform other UI actions (say pause the player robot immediately). For this reason, I did more digging into powerscript development to figure out how to launch the Windows file opening system and return the file name that was clicked and opened. From here, I modified the event loop code for the pygame graphics, that are displaying the app view I show above, to utilize multithreading to launch the windows powerscript job, maintain the GUI operation, and cancel user requests to import more files while the file opening system is already running.
As of now, once the user selects their file, the python code just prints the file returned, but given the previous work I have posted to our team Github of spawning an OMR job from python with the file string as input, this should hopefully be a straightforward integration hack. I may also want to multithread the OMR job appropriately.
According to our team Gantt chart I am on schedule. Tomorrow I should finish the home screen UI, which is pretty much done, and by next week all user actions should be implemented including the OMR integration. I have been on schedule every week so far, but just since next week is such a large task, I will have to work longer to get it done and still likely will fall short of finishing. (I say this because getting the file insertion view working properly took a few hours alone) Ultimately, I will try to get as much as I can finished and catch up as necessary.