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 MacShapa

MacSHAPA information and download

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December 2003: MacSHAPA v1.1.1 and the Mac OS X video controller have been completed and will soon be available for download from this page. MacSHAPA manual (v1.0.3) is restored from its 1994 version and is available for download--see below. (A tidier pdf version will be available shortly.) The older MacSHAPA v1.1 is also available below in self-extracting archive format. 

 

Background

 

MacSHAPA is a Macintosh-based software tool for performing video analysis and for applying a range of sequential data analysis techniques to the results. It is distributed free of charge to interested researchers and is supported by researchers wishing to have a priority call on new MacSHAPA functionality or special customisation of MacSHAPA for research needs. Our goal is to produce an open-source version of MacSHAPA that will be platform-independent.

 

MacSHAPA was initially developed at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under Penelope Sanderson's supervision with funding from the following sources:

  • NASA-Ames Research Centre

  • Wright-Patterson Air Force Base through Logicon Technical Services

  • University of Illinois Research Board

  • Defence Science and Technology Organisation (Australia). 

Quite a few behavioral researchers worldwide have come to depend on MacSHAPA for analysing video data.

 

MacSHAPA manual

 

We have done an initial restoration of the 1994 MacSHAPA v1.0.3 manual and mounted it here for download as several Word documents. It still needs a bit of cleaning up (eg, pagination glitches, etc) before I can put it in .pdf form.

 

Once these are in your Mac environment, you can open them with Microsoft Word for Mac. They may not open automatically after download, but if you open them in Word then things should start moving in the right direction.

MacSHAPA software

 

Version 1.0.3 is not the latest version of MacSHAPA. There were some moderate changes to MacSHAPA in each release after v1.0.3 that were document in the Release Notes for each version. There was a v1.1 that was widely released with QuickTime support.

  • MacSHAPA_1_1.sea (MacSHAPA v1.1. Self-Extracting Archive when clicked in Mac environment)

There was also a v1.2 on limited release from 1998 with our first pass at X-by-time, X-by-Ord, and X-by-Y plotting routines. 

 

Current maintenance

 

With the arrival of Mac OS X on the G4 platform, MacSHAPA requires some maintenance. The need to do this maintenance opens the possibility of research into current exploratory sequential data analysis practices. The result may be a substantial rewriting of the MacSHAPA software that will have two outcomes:

  • It will deliver MacSHAPA's core strengths in more maintainable and possibly open source format.

  • It will allow us to correct some user interaction problems caused by inadequate underlying software design.

  • It will allow us to exploit digital AV storage and manipulation in a way that was not practical 10 years ago when MacSHAPA was first designed.

We are fortunate that John Mainzer is available to perform the upgrade and maintenance needed and to explore a possible rewriting. John worked on the original MacSHAPA development team. For many years he has maintained the code and has interacted with users on an unpaid basis. With the support of several sponsors since October 2002, John has been on partial appointments at University of Illinois to work on MacSHAPA.

 

If you wish to become a sponsor of MacSHAPA or would like to discuss customised functionality with us, please contact Professor Penelope Sanderson psanderson@humanfactors.uq.edu.au

 

 

Professor Penelope Sanderson

The University of Queensland

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (adjunct appt)