2015 – The Year of the Easy Button

Maybe I’m an optimist making a bold statement. But I truly do believe that technologies that were previously complex have made their way to the forefront of ease and usability. I’m talking about Easy Buttons. And now is a better time than ever to generate and incorporate easy-button processing into your workflows! There are really two different ways to implement the easy button. Let’s explore them below:

1. Add an Easy Button to your Desktop Interface:  Adding a button to your ENVI Desktop is really quite simple. Just open IDL and selectFile  > New ENVI Extension. Wrapper code is automatically generated for you and comments direct you exactly whereto place your processing code:

Let’s not skim over the processing code as that’s the place where the most intimidation occurs. The new ENVI Task API makes it easier than ever to string together processing tasks into a custom reusable workflow. For example, say you want to perform radiometric calibration, dark subtraction atmospheric correction, and then isodata classification. You would use the RadiometricCalibration, DarkSubtractionCorrection, and ISODATAClassification tasks respectively. Your code would look something like this:

Once your code is in place, you just need to build your project, restart ENVI, and you are on your way!

2. The other way to implement easy buttons are in the enterprise. Similar to generating a New ENVI Extension – you can click a button to generate a New ENVI Task. This generates a place where you drop your processing code, as well as a JSON companion file describing your inputs,outputs, and parameters.

When you are finished - simply zip up your files and upload them to your ESE installation. Scroll up to see a screen shotof the Isodata Classification Easy Button. Contact me for a live demonstration.

I’d love to hear what Easy Buttons you hope to implement this year!