Fitzroy

Ian became Managing Director of Fitzroy in 2003, having done some part-time work for Fitzroy prior to this: in the 1980's he created a sprial staircase data generator, and a dot-matrix character set for plotting, in the 1990's Ian wrote the NL-STRESS GUI (Graphical User Interface). Since working for Fitzroy full-time, Ian has converted the NL-STRESS GUI to a 32-bit Windows Application. Ian has also converted the TAPE plot editor, the SCALE printing interface, the Windows interface to the SAND, SCALE, LUCID, SPADE, and NL-STRESS programs, and all other programs in the SAND and SCALE suites to 32-bit Windows Applications. Ian has added print preview and html-help facilites to the suites and added an automatic save to pdf option for each printout. Ian mans the telephone support hot-line.

Recently Ian has developed NL-Studio which provides 3D visualisation of the results of NL-STRESS analyses, which will be released during 2008. The deflections, stresses, bending moments and shear forces are displayed on screen on a scale model of the structure utilising Direct3D, OpenGL or software rendering, as appropriate to the user's PC. Selected plots can then be saved as 3D PDF files to enable viewing the 3D model on any computer using the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader; a facility is provided to combine PDFs, so multiple 3D PDFs can be joined with regular PDFs containing e.g. a job description, data and results into one large PDF file. These PDFs are useful for providing selected information to clients, checkers or putting on web-pages for marketing purposes.