Spatial Vision - 30th Anniversary Update

This is one of the first programs I worked on, part of a set, way back in 1990. It's also the first software that I had published (i.e., sold for money). Here we are 30 years later, and I'm still updating and selling this app.

I like this app in particular because it's a nice illustration of how computing power has changed in 30 years. It does various manipulations on images using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), which requires LOTS of floating-point math. I first developed this program in HyperCard on a Macintosh IIsi. That Mac had a 20 MHz 68030 CPU, in case you don't remember. The grayscale images and number crunching were done with an XCMD written in Think Pascal—HyperCard did not support color at the time and was VERY SLOW.

The first version of the program took just under 30 seconds to complete the image analysis (128 x 128 pixel, grayscale). It was acceptable, but barely (students are not a patient lot). I was actually happy that it didn't take longer. Soon after, the 68882 math coprocessor became available, and I rewrote the Pascal code to take advantage of the FPU. The result was nothing short of miraculous. Calculation time was down to 7 seconds!

Eventually, HyperCard ceased to exist, and I converted the program to Director/Shockwave (2002). It was distributed on CDs and on the web. At that point, the speed had increased so much, that I included color images (3x the calculations) and increased their size to 256 x 256. Even with the calculations written in Lingo, it still took just a few seconds to complete the calculations.

When Director/Shockwave went away, the next conversion was to iOS. When I timed this version, I was surprised to see that the calculation time was now measured in milliseconds. Running on my Mac, the time is around 7-8 ms, and on an iPad Air (1st gen) it's around 10-15 ms. That's with 512 x 512, 24-bit images! Now it actually takes longer to draw the data into the new images than it does to do the calculations.

Attached are screen captures showing what the app looked like in 1990 and what it looks like today.



Here's the App Store link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/insight-spatial-vision/id602302299?ls=1