JOONE

So we began working with JOONE: The Java Object Oriented Neural Environment. Unfortunately, I had an emergency appendectomy during the week that the class worked on it, so I didn't have an opportunity to explore it with my peers. But I have had a chance to look through it and I've noticed a few things:

1) It violates Apple's Human Interface Guidelines! Of course, it's meant to be a cross-platform program, but having gotten used to a certain way of programs working, it's a bit hard to get used to. There are, of course, worse things that a program could do.
2) It is open source and the GUI editor we're using is just a front end to a very powerful Java programming environment. Unfortunately, most of my programming experience is in Objective-C, so it will be a bit of a learning curve for me to try to create a network just from the APIs that JOONE has, but I hope to try to give my Java chops a spin again.
3) The GUI is a bit hard to get used to and the complete guide is mostly based on the actual programming environment rather than the GUI front end, but the guide was quite useful in understanding the underlying frameworks of the network environment. It should be helpful and especially interesting were the different layers: a variety of different functions and synapses are available for different kinds of networks. I really hope I can spend a bit of time playing with some of the other kinds of layers and synapses to see what kinds of results it yields.

JOONE can run off of any UNIX environment, so I've installed it on my Linux server and I've been playing around with the source code on there to try different tricks in the builds, though most of my attempts at tricks just made the program not compile and even once impressively caused a kernel panic in my machine. I'm keeping the stable, working version running on my Mac and using my Linux server as my development test bed.