Tutorial video - how to install an XOP

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Thu, 03/26/2009 - 10:44 pm

Sometimes people have a difficult time installing XOPs. I made a little video tutorial on how to install an XOP. You can find it at:

http://blip.tv/file/1924491

Please excuse my voice/rambling. I may put some more videos up in the future (installation of procedures, etc). However, if you would like to see anything specific covered, please let me know.
The software I used was called iShowU HD (I think). It's quite cool, and not too expensive. I think that it's a great medium to explain stuff to people. I definitely think it would be worth Igor having more tutorials of this kind, it's just a question of how to host them.

March 28, 2009 at 02:44 am - Permalink

Very nice.

One comment - There is no point in dragging the XOP into User Procedures and then putting an alias in Igor Extensions. You may as well just drag the XOP into Igor Extensions. Our intent for User Procedures is a place to put user procedure files that will be #included.

Another intention was that users would store their stuff outside the Igor Pro folder and use aliases to enable that stuff. The main point of this is so that the user can update the Igor Pro folder without fear of overwriting their own files. However, this did not work out very well because we didn't provide the user with a convenient place to put their stuff. In Igor Pro 6.1, there is such a place which you can find by choosing Help->Igor Pro 6 User Files from Igor. Then the place to put the XOP is in "Igor Pro 6 User Files\Igor Extensions".

March 29, 2009 at 08:27 am - Permalink

hrodstein wrote:

One comment - There is no point in dragging the XOP into User Procedures and then putting an alias in Igor Extensions. You may as well just drag the XOP into Igor Extensions. Our intent for User Procedures is a place to put user procedure files that will be #included.

Another intention was that users would store their stuff outside the Igor Pro folder and use aliases to enable that stuff. The main point of this is so that the user can update the Igor Pro folder without fear of overwriting their own files. However, this did not work out very well because we didn't provide the user with a convenient place to put their stuff. In Igor Pro 6.1, there is such a place which you can find by choosing Help->Igor Pro 6 User Files from Igor. Then the place to put the XOP is in "Igor Pro 6 User Files\Igor Extensions".


Thanks for the compliment. Perhaps I should've placed it somewhere else. For me it all comes down to how things are packaged. If you have a package that has procedures and XOP's you naturally want to keep them in the same place, within some kind of package tree structure. From the distribution POV one can get the path to the IGOR application directory fairly simply (Registry key on windows, assume /Applications/..... on Mac). The easiest place to plonk a package is therefore /User Procedures. When wants to update a package with an installer you have a fairly good idea of where the old version is going to be, because you didn't give the user the choice of where it was going to go. The trouble with the /Igor Pro 6 User Files/ directory is that it doesn't exist on Igor v5, which a lot of the package users will still have.

If there was some kind of repository/Igor installation system this issue would disappear. I think that the freedom that Igor has for loading procedure files is great, because it allows the user to create whatever code they like and store it anywhere. However, once you get towards distributing packages that have to be updated this freedom makes the whole install/update/delete process haphazard because you never know where things are, what you've overwritten, etc. One thing that I like about Python/Java, is that they have the concept of "eggs/Jar files". For packages the "egg" concept could be nice for Igor because it would be a payload of procedures/XOP's, that are tied in one place. If Igor could have an "egg" loader + unloader that would make packaging things easier, but one would probably have to load XOP's dynamically (I know that I definitely wouldn't like my XOP's to be unloaded dynamically).

March 29, 2009 at 03:35 pm - Permalink