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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.
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) |
