A little while back I was digging through a hard disk pulled out of an old computer of which belonged to my family back when I was in high school (if I remember it’s power supply died and wasn’t worth fixing). Somewhere in there, I came across the first proper application I ever wrote - Leela, a very basic neural network designed to learn to recognise hand written letters.
Basically, there’s a simple input window allowing you to draw a letter with the mouse, and you can then either tell the system what letter is is, or ask it to guess. It’s not terribly accurate, but I was quite pleased with myself at the time (I think this was about year 10 or 11). I’ve not looked seriously at the source code there, but I doubt it’s anything I’d consider even remotely professional standard. As I recall, this was the first serious thing I ever wrote in C, and I was also learning my way around the good old Mac OS Toolbox at the time.
Anyway, the PPC version still works under Mac OS X 10.4 under classic if anyone wants to play with it. I don’t have a copy of CodeWarrior handy to see if I can still build it, but I’m assuming it could be done with a sufficiently old version.
So, without further ado, here’s the Leela application and source code. I should probably mention that this was very much inspired by a HyperCard program I once played with which, if I remember, was called Letter Learner. Maybe I should try a to rewrite it as an excuse to learn Cocoa properly sometime.
Anyone else still have their first real app?
Oh, and not that it will be useful to anyone I imagine, but consider the app and source code public domain.