Senior Project - Show and Tell

One of Kelly Cable's primary businesses is the location and mapping of underground utilities such as power and telephone cables, water and sewer lines, and gas lines. In the past, a Kelly Cable representative would visit a site and locate and map the underground systems using a manual, paper-based approach. Kelly Cable has developed a pen-based computer application to automate much of this process. A goal is to license and sell this application under the Kelly Cable name. For the project, their desire was to have an electronic brochure that would describe the automated system and its advantages to prospective customers. This would take a prospective client through the features of the program and give an overview of the product and how the product is used.

Rather than producing a hard-wired electronic brochure specific to the current capabilities of one particular system, the project team produced a set of simple to use C++ classes to allow for the rapid construction of arbitrary electronic brochures. The classes provide a user interface to facilitate the movement through the "pages" of the brochure, as well as mechanisms for the display of text, graphics, and animations on the pages. Many special effects, such as fading images and text in and out, and the flight of text across the screen were also implemented. The project was implemented in a PC Windows environment.