Management Team

Apso team includes specialists in Hardware, Software, Networks, NT Operating Systems, Software Development, Web Technology, Textile Design, Graphic Design and Project Management. It has successfully completed many outstanding projects for a diverse range of clients within the Textile Industry.

Members of development program enjoy the following benefits Direct access to the fastest open standard 3D rendering logic in the world.

The very latest 3Di ActiveX controls. 
Full technical support. 
Free example source code. 
So whether you are a C++ developer or simply want to use any apso technology in your Visual Basic program, do yourself a big favour and get in touch.

1) Apso development department 

Apso has been developing software for the textile industry since 1983. Originally on the Amiga platform, apso moved to the Win32 platform with the advent of WindowsNT 3.51.

Our software development expertise covers a wide range from high-level client-server and web-based development including ActiveX, ADO, ASP, ATL, through C++, MFC, and VB, to the raw zeros and ones of low-level interfacing to electronic looms.

Apso have been developing and using COM components. CAD applications are very "visual" oriented, COM and ActiveX controls are a particularly good fit for this sort of development, and apso has reaped the benefits of code-reuse with many user-interface components used across several applications.

On the data access front apso has used Microsoft data access components through all of their history from DAO to ODBC and now ADO.

2) Apso Archive

Thin client using ASP server-side scripting with no client-side controls, for maximum cross-browser / platform support. 

Apso’s archive technology can use a central SQL server database or Access database for standalone installations. ADO is used to access archive database both from server side ASP and client side ActiveX controls. All archive information, including designs and thumbnails, is stored in the back end database, providing easy system administration and backup. 

The client front-end is designed to be extensively and easily customizable to generate a unique interface for each customer. Archive administrators can also tailor the format of the design information to their particular needs, adding custom fields and categories (also sub-categories in a tree as deep as you want) for searching and tagging images.
Intuitive drag-and-drop for design loading, straight from the browser into archive enabled design programs.


The client side image loading is again handled by COM components, enabling this interface to be licensed to third parties to archive-enable their applications.

Enhancements in development include printing direct from the archive, and design loading directly by HTTP with all database access server-side.

3) Apso 3Di technology

Apso 3Di is a next-generation texture mapping software originally targeted at the textile industry, but with a huge range of applications. Software in this market has traditionally taken a 2½D approach, modelling objects using 2D grids modified to give the illusion of 3D perspective, and using proprietary 2D texturing algorithms. 

Apso is the first to bring the power of 3D graphics software and hardware now available as standard on PC systems to bear on this problem. The apso 3Di solution provides full 3D modelling and texture mapping over a 2D background image, blending the light and shadow information from the original image with the textured 3D models to produce uniquely photo-realistic result – in moments.

Using 3D modelling allows faster and more intuitive creation of object meshes, as well as the ability to load full 3D models from libraries and simply move them to the right position in 3D space. Because only the visible portion of an object has to be modelled for this application, apso have developed a range of tools optimized for doing this quickly and efficiently, with pixel-perfect alignment to the background image.

Apso 3Di uses the industry standard OpenGL™ 3D graphics API, now provided as standard on both Windows NT and Windows 95/98. Although OpenGL accelerated hardware is now available, and development versions of 3Di have been tested using them, apso have found that Microsoft’s software OpenGL™ implementation running on Pentium class machines provides superb performance for this application. With apso 3Di, changing textures or colours is a simple drag-and-drop, and rendering is fast enough to allow textures to be moved or resized interactively. Despite their avoiding 3D graphics because of its "high computational cost", none of the 2½D solutions can do this!

Use of OpenGL has also allowed resolution independence. A scene can be authored at high resolution for high quality printouts then used with a reduced size background image for retail on-screen or Web use. The low resolution scene can then be scaled back up for use with a high resolution version of the image, all without any loss of modelling information. Scene resolution is limited only by available memory – some of our customers routinely work on scenes thousands of pixels in width and height.

Apso 3Di ActiveX Controls

The scene manager and rendering engine are shared across heavyweight MFC MDI scene authoring applications and (comparatively) lightweight ActiveX scene viewing controls. With the first versions of the control used in applications which were pilot-tested in mid-1997, apso was one of the first to use full 3D rendering in an ActiveX control.

ActiveX allows easy use of components by both apso and by others. The apso 3Di control is the first ActiveX control that apso has licensed to third party developers and is already used in several applications now rolling out to hundreds of sites around the world. 

Latest versions of the control include enhancements for use over the Web, including compression of scenes and texture images and loading both scenes and textures by HTTP. 

A plug-in version for Netscape is expected soon, and, showing the flexibility of the COM approach, apso has also demonstrated server-side rendering for complete platform independence (at high bandwidth and server CPU cost of course.