index.html Copyright (c) 1996 Allen Knutson, Matthew Levine, Gregory Warrington This file is part of The Juggler. The Juggler is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The Juggler is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with The Juggler; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. The Juggler

The Juggler

That's right, yet another group of people has written a Java applet to animate juggling patterns. But we weren't out to play with Java, we wanted a new portable juggling animator, and we figured we'd add some features we'd never seen before along the way. Here's a brief list of

Features

Does vanilla siteswap, plus synchronous patterns, multiplexes, bounces, and outside throws. Coming soon: arm crossing

Accepts new patterns interactively, like you would want it do. There is also interactive control over many internal parameters, including speed, ball size, gravity, wideness of pattern, how far the hands dip to throw a ball, how far the hands carry a ball after a catch, how fast it zooms, "how random to be" in random mode, and the spacing of the space-time diagram. The only interesting parameter you might need to look at html to change is the default size, and that is only because netscape doesn't seem to provide a way to resize a running applet. (Note: appletviewer does.) We know of no such parameter that you'd need to edit java code to change. (If you see one we overlooked, please tell us and we'll add the control.)

Does real transitions. When you enter a new pattern it computes and does transition throws to get there. Includes changes in the number of balls and changes in synchrony. Automatically zooms in or out as necessary.

Shows you what is wrong with unjugglable patterns by drawing an orbits diagram.

Has a companion applet to animate space-time diagrams alongside the juggler.

Has a companion applet to animate transitions of the state graph alongside the juggler. Coming soon: control of the juggler from the state graph

Rewritten siteswap FAQ in html with instances of the applet embedded.

Running the Juggler

There are several options for running the juggler. Note before you click on one of these, that there are 33 class files, so especially over a modem it can take a while for the Juggler to load. I recommend downloading it and running it off local disk.

Standalone JugglerThis is the full juggler with all the bells and whistles. If you just want to play, this is a good place. (If you have Sun's appletviewer available (from the Java Development Kit), I recommend downloading the juggler and running the appletviewer on this page.)

Standalone Juggler LiteThis is the full juggler, but without the companion applets to display space-time diagrams and state graphs. Some people may prefer to play with this instead.

Animated Siteswap FAQ This is a siteswap FAQ with lightweight versions of the applet embedded to show what is being discussed. Unfortunately, current versions of Netscape tend to get into trouble trying to bring up multiple copies of these applets. We've had mixed results with different versions of Netscape on different systems. In general netscape for Windows 95 has done better than for Linux or SUNOS, but who knows. If you have lots of memory maybe you'll do better.

Unanimated Siteswap FAQThis is the animated siteswap FAQ with blanks where the applets would be. You probably want to look at this, especially if you aren't already familiar with juggling programs, because it includes program documentation and sample patterns

Downloading the Juggler

This is version 0.81 (6/22/96). See the change log for a list of changes from previous versions. As I said above, if you don't have a great net connection, you may want to download. You can get the current version by clicking here for a gzipped tar file or here for a zipped file.

The Juggler is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

If for some reason that link to the license fails you can always get a copy from the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Please note that the source code is currently a mess. If you want to modify The Juggler you are of course free too, but for the moment we are discouraging you from sending us changes that implement new features. It will be hard for you, and we'd like to clean things up and add a few more features that we know roughly how we want to code before taking code from anyone else. Bug fixes are of course welcome.

Feedback

If you have problems, questions, comments, criticism, suggestions or anything of that sort, please mail one of us:

Allen Knutson (allenk@alumni.caltech.edu)

Matt Levine (mslevine@theory.lcs.mit.edu) (Most likely to respond promptly, at least for summer '96)

Greg Warrington (waringtn@netcom.com)

If you are having problems like netscape crashing or hanging when trying to run this, please don't complain to us. If anything complain to Netscape. In the meantime consider getting downloading the Sun appletviewer. It won't show you any html, but it does in general correctly run the applet. I prefer it for use of the standalone. There is a known bugs list that you should check before submitting reports of problems.