Because of multiple user requests and our continuous quest to improve documentation we have sat together last week and recorded some video tutorials which cover various parts of HeuristicLab.

So far we have created 4 video tutorials:

How to Execute Algorithms in HeuristicLab

The video shows how you can parameterize and execute algorithms in HeuristicLab:

HeuristicLab Usability and Views

This video demonstrates the basic user interface concepts of HeuristicLab and how to effectively use them:

Experiment Design and Analysis in HeuristicLab

This video shows how to create experiments and batch-runs in HeuristicLab as well as how to analyze the generated results:

How to create Custom Algorithms in HeuristicLab

This video shows how algorithms in HeuristicLab can be adapted in the GUI by extending a Genetic Algorithm to incorporate a crossover probability:

Additionally we have also created a video which gives a quick overview of HeuristicLab's most important features:

You can watch the videos here or head over to our new  HeuristicLab YouTube channel. Let us know what you think and don't forget to Like our videos!

Daniel Knittl-Frank is currently working on porting HeuristicLab to Linux/Mono and sent us screenshots of his progress which I wanted to share with you. Daniel has already got a modified version of HeuristicLab running on Ubuntu 11.10 with the git master of Mono. The last addition to his HL version is that charting now also works with Mono. So here is some eyecandy for the Linux users out there showing 3 views for analyzing runs:

Here is the bubble chart view on Linux:

The tabular view:

And the box-plot diagram:

Of course this is work in progress and hasn't yet landed in our subversion repository but will be integrated when we feel it is stable enough.

As mentioned in a previous Blog post there are some users who are experiencing problems with the user interface not resizing correctly. With HeuristicLab 3.3.6 there will be an option to switch to other document window styles where this problem doesn't occur. In 3.3.6 you will find an entry "View -> Change MainForm Type" in the menubar. This opens a dialog where you can choose between different MainForm types:

There are 3 types of MainForms which can be used. The Docking MainForm is the standard HeuristicLab user interface where documents are displayed as tab pages:

Additionally there is a Multiple and a Single Document option. The Multiple Document MainForm displays documents as windows within the HeuristicLab main window:

The Single Document MainForm creates for each document an own window which is also shown in the Windows taskbar:

The resizing issue doesn't occur with the Single and Multiple Document styles. This means you can use these different document window styles and don't have to switch to another language or DPI size (see UsersFAQ).

These changes are already in trunk and you can try them out if you are affected by this problem.

On some machines it might happen that controls are not correctly resized and the HeuristicLab GUI looks like this:

This behavior results from a bug in the GUI frameworks (either Windows Forms or the Dock Panel Suite). There are two known causes for this problem. The first one is that the Windows text size is set to a value larger than 100%. To avoid this bug, the Windows text size in the Windows display settings has to be set to 100%. This can be done in the dialog shown below which can be opened from the Windows Control Panel (Control Panel -> Appearance and Personalization -> Display).

The other possible cause for this problem is the "Language for non-Unicode programs" setting of your Windows operating system. There are some languages which we know cause a resizing problem in HeuristicLab, e.g. Latvia. German or English on the other hand work fine. A possible workaround at the moment would be that you switch this setting to German or English. The downside of this is however that applications which don't support Unicode might not display text correctly anymore. The following screen shot shows how you can change the setting:

We are at the moment further investigating the problem and hope to come up with a fix for this bug soon.