COMP1710: MondrianDrawer

The MondrianDrawer application was written by Kerryn Boorman as part of a Summer Research Scholarship supervised by Tom Gedeon. Kerryn completed COMP1710 a couple of years ago. The application is still a work in progress, so if you discover any odd behaviour, please let Tom know. Please mention what happened, and how to reproduce the effect (if you can).

Download and Setup

The application can be downloaded from here.

This will download a zip file. You can decompress it by double-clicking on it, which should create a folder called "MondrianDrawer". Double-click on this folder to enter it, and then double-click on the "MondrianDrawer.jar" file which contains the application to run it. (Please don't delete the extra file and folder or otherwise it won't work.)

Running MondrianDrawer

You should now see a small window with three buttons, "New Drawing Image" "New Generated Image" and "Load Existing File".

Drawing Image

Press the button. A window opens in which you can draw Mondrian-like images. The two buttons at the top are grey as they will be used by the other mode. The images you draw are all constrained to be legal Mondrian images, with various properties (more on this later).

The Drawing interface functions as follows:

• Click and drag - draw line (will only work if relatively horiz/vert on the mouse down/mouse up points), so a diagonal click and drag will do nothing
• Double-click and drag - if clicked on a line will drag it
• Right-click (or ctrl-click) - will delete a line, but only it is a deletable line, one with equal-ish space on either side (e.g. with a drawing which looks like an H, the centre bar of the H could be deleted)
• Click - if clicked in the centre of a space then it will cycle the fill colours (red, blue, yellow, white)

Now draw some images, saving one or two you like as .PNG images. (Append .PNG to the names.)

Generated Image

This interface works similarly to the one I described in lectures. Press the button, and a window opens with a different interface.

Generation interface functions as follows:

• Click - add point
• Click and drag - move point (initial window only)
• Double click - delete point
• Click Generate to build an image, click convert to change it to a modifable Drawing Image.

Draw some images. I suggest using 3 or 4 points initially, well separated both vertically and horizontally. Pressing the Generate button will produce a possible Mondrian-like image using those points. Repeatedly pressing the button will show many more possible images built from the same points. While showing a generated image, points can be added or deleted.

Save a couple of images that you like. (Append .PNG to the names.)

You can use the Convert button to move the image into a Drawing interface so you can move the lines and so on. (But with the current version you won't be able to move back, so if you want to generate more images from your current points, save them to a file using the File / Save points for reload menu choice.

Modifying MondrianDrawer's properties

MondrianDrawer has a number of user settable properties. To modify these you have to quit the application, modify the model.properties file, and restart the application. In a later version there may be a menu based way of doing this. If you double-click on the model.properties file, the Mac OS will ask what program to use to open this. Within the dialog box navigate to the Applications folder and within that chose the Text Editapplication.

There are a few general properties, but most of them relate to the Generation interface. Experiment with modifying some of the properties. For example, I like specifying how many rectangles to fill with colour, rather that the default 50% filled with colour, so I would change "fillFreq=0.5" to "fillFreq=2".

Save a few more images which you like. If you want to keep any of the images after you log off, remember to copy them to you uXXXXXXX space or usb stick etc, or they will be deleted as you log off.

Web page

Add 1 or more of the Mondrian-like images you created to your web page.

Did you learn anything using the program? Was one of the modes better for your own style of drawing / creating? Do you know why you like the images you kept? Or can you figure out why you might like them now by looking back at the images you created?