Had a couple of programming discoveries at work in the last week or so. The first is Dev-C++, a free IDE for Windows. I’ve got Visual Studio as well, but this seems like a really good environment (not least of which because it’s free).
The second discovery was Simple DirectMedia Layer (or libSDL) – a cross-platform multimedia library that provides low-level access to input, graphics, and audio hardware. It seems to work really nicely, and the best thing about it is that the same code will compile under Windows and Linux with no alterations, as far as I’ve sene so far.
I’ve been playing with a few graphics libraries, trying to get a decent visualisation going, but they’ve all been too slow. SDL, on the other hand, is very zippy and nice and easy to use.
I knocked up a fake visualisation in no time, once I’d got to grips with SDL, and I’m looking forward to refining my code and making it work on real data.