Detta är ett 10-poängs examensarbete på C-nivå, som vi under vårterminen avlagt vid Karlstads universitet. Målet med vårt projekt var att skapa ett nytt grafiskt gränssnitt till en komprimeringsalgoritm vid namn PAZ. Nuförtiden finns en hel uppsjö av grafiska gränssnitt till komprimeringsalgoritmer, men inget av dem stöder möjligheten att plugga in en egenutvecklad algoritm. Därför var vi tvungna att skapa vårt eget gränssnitt, som förutom PAZ också skulle stödja ZIP, RAR och andra etablerade algoritmer. Vi har alltså skapat ett grafiskt gränssnitt, vilket är anpassat för en implementation av den nya PAZ-algoritmen. Algoritmen har utvecklats av vår uppdragsgivare Martin Larsson. Gränssnittet har vi, i samarbete med Martin, valt att kalla för Winpaz. Vi började med att göra två prototyper, som vi bland annat delade ut till personer på universitetet för att få respons på användarvänligheten hos gränssnitten. Med utgångspunkt från resultaten av dessa tester, konstruerade vi sedan vårt slutgiltiga gränssnitt. Kravet vi hade på oss var att skapa ett användarvänligt grafiskt gränssnitt, som skulle stödja de vanligaste algoritmerna. Vi nådde målet att implementera stöd för algoritmerna ZIP och TAR. Dock fick vi göra avkall på implementationen av algoritmerna PAZ och RAR på grund av tidsbrist, men anpassade gränssnittet så att en senare inpluggning av dessa algoritmer är möjlig. Vi är nöjda med vår slutprodukt, men inser också att det troligen krävs en del ytterligare funktionalitet för att gränssnittet ska fungera exemplariskt. Under projektet har vi, förutom att vi stärkte våra kunskaper i C++-programmering, även lärt oss att använda utvecklingsverktyget wx-DevCpp. Utöver detta har vi lärt oss att programmera grafiska gränssnitt med hjälp av wxWidgets. / This is a bachelor´s project that we have been working on during a period of ten weeks, full time. The goal of our project was to design and implement a GUI for a new data compression algorithm called PAZ. At present, a vast array of compression/extraction GUIs is available, but none of them provide the possibility to incorporate a user developed algorithm. Thus, we had to create our own, with support for not only PAZ, but also ZIP, RAR, and other well known archiving algorithms. And so, we have created a GUI that is well suited for an implementation of the new PAZ algorithm. The PAZ algorithm has been developed by Martin Larsson. We chose, in collaboration with Martin, to name the GUI application Winpaz. We began by implementing two separate prototypes, which we sent out to be tested by a closed group of beta testers. The reason for this test was to investigate how to design various parts of the application to be user friendly. Using the results from the testers, we then began the development of our final version of the GUI. Our goals were to implement a user friendly GUI, that supported PAZ as well as the most widespread algorithms already in use. We achieved our first goal, to design a user friendly GUI, and we implemented support for both ZIP and TAR, but had to abandon our efforts in implementing RAR and PAZ support due to lack of time. The interface is however designed with the future incorporation of these algorithms in mind. We are fairly pleased with our work, but we also recognize the need for added functionality in order to make the GUI a commercial grade product. During this project we have, apart from broadening our knowledge and skill in C++ programming, also learned to use the IDE wxDevCpp, a powerful open source tool for developing GUI applications based on the wxWidgets framework.

Hur ett grafiskt användargränssnitt (GUI) upplevs av användaren kan bero på flera faktorer, två av de viktigaste är komplexitet och användbarhet. Det kan vara svårt att sätta fingret på vad komplexitet egentligen är, i GUIn kan den upplevas genom svårigheter att navigera eller förstå. Användbarhet är något som blir mer populärt och allt fler företag väljer att satsa på. Uppsatsens fokus kommer ligga på att reda ut begreppen komplexitet och användbarhet, vad de har för påverkan i ett GUI och hur de samverkar.   För att finna svar på problemet har en litteraturstudie där artiklar från olika vetenskapliga tidsskrifter har granskats, sammantaget med kurslitteratur från utbildningen har synteser skapats, på vilka en intervju kunde grundas. Intervjun genomfördes med 10 personer från olika kunskapsnivåer inom IT för att försöka se skillnader eller samband inom deras upplevelse av komplexitet och användbarhet. För att undersöka specifika aspekters antagna påverkan presenterades sex modeller för respondenterna.   I studien har det framkommit stöd för att det finns ett starkt samband mellan komplexitet och användbarhet, att komplexiteten som helhet påverkar användbarhet, men det visade sig också att funktionaliteten spelade en viss del, främst när det gällde komplexiteten, varför den också fått en roll i uppsatsen.

Marknaden för försäljning av applikationer för smartphones växer snabbt, värdet på den ökar i samma takt och i och med detta kommer även flera nya aktörer in på marknaden. Planerar man att starta en applikationsbutik och sälja applikationer till smartphones kommer det vara avgörande för kundernas användarupplevelse att hemsidan och/eller butiksapplikation har ett användargränssnitt som är logiskt upplagt, rent och översiktligt samt visuellt tilltalande. Genom att uppfylla dessa krav kan en konkurrensfördel skapas som bör leda till ökad försäljning. Det här arbetets syfte har varit att finna svar på frågan om hur man kan utforma ett användargränssnitt för en applikationsbutik så att det blir lättare att snabbt hitta applikationer efter specifika krav och vad man bör tänka på under designprocessen. Analyserna visar att det man till att börja med bör ha i åtanke, är att kategorisera innehållet på ett så tydligt sätt som möjligt genom att använda enkla begrepp och inte ha för många kategorier att välja mellan, vilket försvårar översikten för användaren. Vidare är t.ex. filtreringen och sorteringen avgörande för att kunna hitta det man söker utan att behöva leta igenom ett stort antal sökträffar. Genom att ha de båda funktionerna tillgängliga samtidigt och på samma ställe blir skillnaden dem emellan tydligare och de båda funktionerna kan utnyttjas bättre av användaren. Ytterligare en viktig aspekt att fundera kring, är användandet av fritextsökfältet och hur detta kan förbättras för användarna genom att ge förslag på sökningar och ge beskrivningar av resultaten. En annan fråga som också behandlats är hur man ska tänka när man ska skala ned hemsideversionen av en applikationsbutik så att den fungerar i ett gränssnitt för butiksapplikationer anpassade för smartphones. Även här är bl.a. användandet av kategorier och hur de visas, av stor betydelse för slutanvändaren. Att scrolla vertikalt snarare än horisontellt är i vårt tycke mer funktionellt och dessutom vanligare då man kan se fler kategorier samtidigt och då kategorinamnen får mer spelrum. I övrigt bör man skala av så mycket som möjligt från hemsidans layout och enbart behålla unika drag för att särskilja sig från konkurrenternas butiksapplikationer och samtidigt behålla tydliga, igenkännbara likheter till hemsidan.

Version control is an important tool for safekeeping of data and collaboration between colleagues. These days, new distributed version control systems are growing increasingly popular as successors to centralized systems like CVS and Subversion. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) make it easier to interact with version control systems, but GUIs for distributed systems are still few and less mature than those available for centralized systems. The purpose of this thesis was to propose specific GUI ideas to make distributed systems more accessible. To accomplish this, existing version control systems and GUIs were examined. A usage survey was conducted with 20 participants consisting of software engineers. Participants were asked to score various aspects of version control systems according to usage frequency and usage difficulty. These scores were combined into an index of each aspect's "unusability" and thus its need of improvement. The primary problems identified were committing, inspecting the working set, inspecting history and synchronizing. In response, a commit helper, a repository visualizer and a favorite repositories list were proposed, along with several smaller suggestions. These proposals should constitute a good starting point for developing GUIs for distributed version control systems.

The clarity and usability of the graphical user interface is very important for the enjoyment of a digital game. Pixel art is an art style with low resolution consisting of a precise placing of pixels, the smallest unit of colour that a screen can display. Pixel art has the potential of being cheap, easy to make and nostalgic, but it takes some skill to handle. However the great weakness of pixel art is displaying letters, and small details with clarity. So is there a place for pixel art in modern games? This thesis will discuss how pixel art games could use their GUI and HUDs to create beautiful games without losing clarity. The aim of this study is to is to compare different games GUI in a systematic way and discuss whether the artists have succeeded in their design of the GUI to give the player a pleasant game experience. A second aim is to find a series of recommendations on how to build a GUI with the least possible intrusion on on a narrative driven game. The main question is how can the GUI be designed and drawn to fit a modern pixel art game without causing a distracting discord to the pixel art style? / Tydlighet och användarvänlighet, i det grafiska användargränssnittet är en mycket viktig del för att göra ett digitalt spel omtyckt. Pixelgrafik är en grafisk stil i låg upplösning som består av en genomtänkt placering av pixlar, de minsta representationen av färg som en skärm kan visa. Pixelgrafik har potentialet att vara billigt, lätt att skapa och nostalgiskt, men den kräver teknik att använda. Den här uppsatsen diskuterar hur pixelgrafik kan använda sitt användargränssnitt och ”Heads up display” för att skapa vackra spel utan att förlora tydlighet.

Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems on the market today with a vast majority of the market share when it comes to mobile devices. Graphical user interfaces (GUI) are often seen on the applications on these devices. Testing of these GUIs is important since they often make up for half of the source code of the application, and they are used to interact with the application. Automating these tests is very useful since it saves a lot of time, but can be difficult. The tools that are available for automating the tests are often not suitable for the developers’ needs, because of the lack of functionality. Therefore, the need for a characterization of the frameworks is needed, so that developers more easily can fit a framework for their needs. In this study, four open source frameworks for Android GUI testing have been selected for evaluation: Robotium, Selendroid, UI Automator and Espresso. Criteria used in the evaluation have been identified with the help of a literature analysis.The results show that two of the frameworks, Robotium and Espresso, lack the ability to fully test activities, which is the main component of Android application GUIs. Furthermore, the study resulted in characterizations of the frameworks.

The electrorefiner (ER) is the heart of pyroprocessing technology operating at a high-temperature (723 K – 773 K) to separate uranium from Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) used metallic fuel. One of the most common electroanalytical methods for determining the thermodynamic and electrochemical behavior of elemental species in the eutectic molten salt LiCl-KCl inside ER is cyclic voltammetry (CV). Information from CV can possibly be used to estimate diffusion coefficients, apparent standard potentials, transfer coefficients, and numbers of electron transferred. Therefore, predicting the trace of each species from the CV method in an absence of experimental data is important for safeguarding this technology. This work focused on the development an interactive computational design for the CV method by analyzing available uranium chloride data sets (1 to 10 wt%) in a LiCl-KCl molten salt at 773 K under different scan rates to help elucidating, improving, and providing robustness in detection analysis. A principle method and a computational code have been developed by using electrochemical fundamentals and coupling various variables such as: the diffusion coefficients, formal potentials, and process time duration. Although this developed computational model works moderately well with reported uranium data sets, it experiences difficulty in tracing zirconium data sets due to their complex CV structures. Therefore, an artificial neural intelligent (ANI) data analysis has been proposed to resolve this issue and to provide comparative study to the precursor computational modeling development. For this purpose, ANI has been applied on 0.5 to 5 wt% of zirconium chloride in LiCl-KCl eutectic molten salt at 773 K under different scan rates to mimic the system and provide current and potential simulated data sets for the unseen data. In addition, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) through the commercial software Matlab was created to provide a controllable environment for different users. The computational code shows a limitation in high concentration CV prediction, capturing the adsorption peaks, and provides a dissimilarity. However, the model is able to capture the important anodic and cathodic peaks of uranium chloride CV which is the main focus of this study. Furthermore, the developed code is able to calculate the concentration of each species as a function of time. Due to the complexity of the CV of zirconium chloride, the computational model is used to predict the probability reactions occurring at each peak. The resulting study reveals that the reaction at the highest anodic peak is related to the combination of 70% Zr/Zr+4 and 30% Zr/Zr+2 for the 1.07 wt% and 2.49 wt% zirconium chloride and 30% Zr/Zr+4 and 70% Zr/Zr+2 combination for 4.98 wt% ZrCl4. The proposed alternative ANI method has demonstrated its capability in predicting the trend of species in a new situation with a high accuracy on predictions without any dissimilarity. Two final structures from zirconium chloride study which high accuracy (that is, a low error) are related to [9, 15, 10]-18 and [10, 11, 25]-19. These two final structures have been applied on uranium chloride salt experimental data sets to further validate the ANI’s ability and concept. Three different fixed data combinations were considered. The result indicates that by increasing the number of training data sets it does not necessarily help improving the prediction process. ANI implementation outcome on uranium chloride data set illustrates a good prediction with a specific fixed data combination and [9, 15, 10]-18 structure. Thus, it can be concluded that ANI is a promising method for safeguarding pyroprocessing technology due to its robustness in predicting the CV plots with high accuracy.

The industrial testing phase of graphical user interfaces and the behaviour of screens, is still involving manual tests with human interaction. This type of testing is particularly difficult and time consuming to manually perform, due to time sensitive messages and information used within these interfaces. This thesis address this issue by introducing an approach to automate this process by utilizing high grade machine vision cameras and existing algorithm implementations from OpenCV 3.2.0. By knowing the expected graphical representation in advance, a comparison between the actual outcome and this expectation can be evaluated by applying image processing algorithms. It is found that this approach presents an Equal Error Rate of 6% while still maintaining a satisfactory time performance, in relation to the timeframe requirement of these time sensitive messages. Accuracy and time performance is profoundly affected by hardware equipment, partially due to the immense amount of image processing involved.

A Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm (WMRA) was designed to aid people with limited or no upper-limb usage to accomplish activities of daily living (ADLs). The primary objective of this research was to enhance the performance of the WMRA by improving the communication protocols and functions between the hardware and software used for its control. Previously, the control algorithm of the robotic arm was tested in simulation and in the physical arm. These implementations required a combination of Matlab and C++ language and introduced some software instability under Windows operating system. To improve the performance of the WMRA, the programs for hardware control were separated from the ones intended for simulation. The control algorithm of the arm was rewritten using C++ language to facilitate the communication with the controller boards and to make the system more stable and reliable. As a result, the communication delays were decreased since the interfaces between different programs is no longer needed. Preliminary tests were performed to demonstrate the stability and reliability of the new control algorithm. The overall response of the control implementation was enhanced and the algorithm routines and optimization procedures achieved the same goals with more efficiency. Accuracy and repeatability tests were performed, and data was collected and analyzed.

One of major concerns in gas turbine industry is to reduce emissions.  Tow kind of approaches could be identified in the industry to reduce emissions, namely Primary Emission Reduction approach and Secondary Emission Reduction approach. The primary approach concerns emission prevention in combustion, while secondary approach is all about emission cleanup before releasing to the atmosphere. Combustion flame temperature highly influences on emissions specially NOx formation.  NOx emission is lower when the combustor operates close to lean flammability limit. Incorporating catalyst to combustor is one of methods to extend flammability limit.  Heat and Power Division at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has developed a test facility to test performances of catalyst in combustion. The combustion test facility available at Heat & Power Davison at KTH, consists of high pressure air compressor and air flow control system, air preheating unit and control system, fuel flow control system, combustor unit, and exhaust gas analyzer system. But lack of proper user interface to control and monitor the operation of the test facility through a computer work station was a major concern from experimenters. The purpose of the thesis work is to design and construction of supervisory control and data acquisition system for the full scale catalytic combustion test facility.  Labview 2012 is used as the main platform for implementing data acquisition and control system for the test facility. Thermocouples, pressure transducer signals, air flow meter signal are connected to Keithley 2701 data acquisition system and then connected to the computer. Fuel flow controllers are directly connected to the computer via serial port. Air flow control actuator signal is given through ADAM digital to analogue converter. Developed GUI is more convenient for users in terms of easy control of air flow, fuel flow and gas sampling probe systems, and monitoring of temperature, pressure measurements and exhaust gas species systems. And also GUI provides web interface to select correct conversion factor, and also to view live data recording. The developed GUI can be accessed through online to monitor the operation.