This is a snapshot of the old and immature visualization tool written in tk on a unix machine. I decided to rewrite my program in Java due to its ultra-portability and since it was a complete OOP language with graphics primitives. In contrast tk is good for user interface issues, but is weak as a programming language. C or C++ are good programming languages but they lack generic graphic routines for cross-platform portability. Hence in order to make C or C++ to work, I would have to combine it with another graphical front end such as tk to get things to work. Instead I chose to simplify with Java.
old comments follow- many of which have been implemented already in the newer version
I would like to also visualize optimization problems into this tool. The following example shows how I might visualize how cheap it would be to place a center node to connect with three outer nodes which are part of an equilateral triangle. The cost is the material to connect the node with the three outer nodes.
The following image shows the minimum placement for a hub for five random points. The blue region is the most desireable and might be more intuative for the user to understand since he or she would like to keep things out of the "dangerous" red area. Also since there are fewer bands the map might be less confusing to the user to work with. It is important to note that a single optimal placement is not presented since it is likely that the designer is not looking for that point and instead is using this information as one crude piece of the larger design problem. It might be a feature of the system to find the "optimal" lowest cost placement.
