Lambert has an excellent convex hull demonstration applet. There is very little documentation and there are minimal interface choices, but everything you need is there. Just a single row of interface controls at the bottom does the trick.
The strange thing about JAVA applets is that often times a programmer can become over-enthusiastic about what you can add to an applet. It is like the initial excitement a young programmer has when they discover object-oriented programming. They make everything into an object—rendering the program entirely unusable and inefficient. Choosing fewer interface elements is not only easier to program, but also easier to use from the user's perspective. The only hard part is having the intuition for selecting what to keep, and what to throw out. Good genes help.
Posted by maeda at December 20, 2004 04:57 PM