The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

AAOGlimpse is a a rather quirky niche image display program with a couple of gimmicky tricks. it displays a 2D image as a 3D surface and encourages the user to spin it around and play with it. It dates from around 2012, and was based on Qt and OpenGL. It was structured to simplify moving to a GUI layer other that Qt, but use of OpenGL permeated the whole code (including the ‘GL’ in the name). And now, annoyingly, it is the use of OpenGL (and a very old version of OpenGL at that) which generates screenfuls of ‘deprecated’ messages when the program is built. So, it is now being comprehensively restructured to work through an abstract 3D graphics layer, the initial version of which uses Vulkan rather then OpenGL.

This presentation describes some of the lessons learned in this process, perhaps the main one being that, in hindsight, the original version should not have been written quite the way it was.