Without contradicting Mr Moita in any way, I would like to add some often overlooked points. One, CLEANLINESS: Your coffee equipment must be as clean as possible. This is true for proper espresso and for decent drip/press coffee I would opinion that it's more important for drip, though the typical espresso drinker has a finer palate, balancing out the lesser sensitivity the espresso process has. When approaching an unknown device, I tend to treat the cleaning as if I was cleaning laboratory gear for use. That is, I clean any loose material, followed by a chemical solution designed to react with the expected contaminants, followed by repeated rinsing. In the case of Coffee gear, a solution of very dilute detergent and lye (yes KOH), which is what most 'coffeepot cleaners' are, except they cost 10x as much, and usually have some scent added (yuck). While that strong a chemical seems a bit much, it is exactly what is needed to remove the baked in coffee oils, which will destroy your finest beans. That said, you must rinse it out until there is no trace of the cleaner, or anything it has loosened. A minimum of three times is a start. You may consider distilled water for the last rinse if your tap water has a strong flavor. Once the gear is properly cleaned, a simple rinse between every pot, with a detergent and rinse about once a day, and a full cleaning about 1 to 2 weeks will maintain the quality. Two, WATER: Until your gear is clean, you won't notice the water, but once it is, this is a major point. Except for distilled water, most drinking water has a flavor. This is from trace minerals in all natural water supplies. Coffee will amplify these flavors, especially the metallic ones. Distilled water is better than bad water, but the best coffee is made from water that you like the flavor of, for example a good (but not too mineral) spring water. Once the above is taken care of, Mr Moita's directions will get you a cup of the finest brew you have tasted, but with dirty gear, or poor water, you will have wasted good beans. Minor point, as I don't have a strong personal opinion, but the defined 'proper' pressure on the coffee powder is 30 lbs (for the standard espresso fixture) or approximately 10 psi. That seems a bit high to me, but it's the number usually quoted.

I will add to that, Logging, Logging, more Logging As well as that, try to identify differences between the development environment and the customers, hardware being number 1. For example I saw one where the developer had tested on a single processor machine, but it would crash on a multi-processor (yes it was a threading issue, but only one where a single move eax is not atomic).

It would help if you separated the Model/View in your head. The data is a 2 dimensional array of depth information. The view is the screen sized zoom the user is looking at. What you want is a bitmap extract function that can run at multiple zoom levels. There is a transition in the extraction algorithm at 1 to 1. It switches from multiple pixels per point to multiple points per pixel. You can probably insist on powers of 2 zoom levels. The big advantage of this is you only extract the bitmap you are actually going to display. My suggestion is that you use a semi-proprietary file form for the data, XML if file space is not an issue, something binary and compressed if it is. The format should allow at least one thumbnail to be attached. You can argue about what to attach, but an overall zoom to a small view (say 200x600) would probably me most useful for selecting files from a list. The file loader will create the needed array in memory (model), not an actual bitmap (view). Combining the model/view is a standard design error that routinely causes massive long term problem as you restrict the available metadata to what the view format will support.