making apps, making webs.

Inspired by the ugliness of a certain other gamedev site, pygames Snakey is transformed with snow and a santa hat. http://www.pygame.org/news.html Also check out some of the cool new games and projects that people have been making.

Dynamic sites, and urls. A website I am working on now, pretendpaper.com is one of those single url sites with lots of fancy DHTML where everything changes dynamically without changing urls. Everything is loaded with a python twisted, wsgi server sending xmlrpc into separate tabs. A while ago I implemented a scheme which works with javascript to inspect the url, and open up different tabs. For example, this link opens up a review and an article into different tabs http://www.pretendpaper.com/?r=5&a=4 Putting in a site url box. Now, to make people be able to share links of what they are looking at in the site, we are going to place a url box in there. So as they open up different bits of the site they can see a link for where they are. It will be like a browser inside of a browser. With a url bar, and tabs. Saving the whole state of website as a url. Now I am working on encoding the whole state of the page into a url. Including the scroll state of the bars in the tabs, and wh...

The save, compile, run cycle I reduced in my source code, why did I think it would be ok in templates? I used the cheetah templates for http://www.pretendpaper.com/ They are a pretty nice way to handle templates. They are nice except for the compile that needed to be done when they are used. This is great for run time efficiency... I think. But not so good for development time efficiency. However now I have removed the need for the templates to be compiled from my code. With the change of a config variable I can also use the compiled templates. Which will be good for the live version of the site. Now I'm starting to think about the other parts in the save, compile, run cycle. If I could get rid of either the save, or run cycles then that'd be great. No more pressing save to see what changes occur. Just change something, and then it will show me the results within a second or so. How can removing the save and run parts be done? By having the editor in the browser. Or h...

I have been learning about the GP2X I received the other week. I have an arm gcc tool chain setup on my windows box, and my linux box. It could have been a much easier experience. However hopefully now the gp2x dev wiki has gathered enough information so new commers should have an easier time. It has a bunch of potential to be a really nice device. It just needs a whole bunch of bug fixes. I think the people at GPH will eventually fix things up. So I wait until I can afford a power supply for the unit. So that I do not have to recharge batteries all the time. Having to copy the file to the SD card via the card reader, then put it in the GP2X and reboot is no fun at all. Considering boot time is 25 seconds or so. Which means a lot of iterative development will not work if I need to wait 1 minute between changes. I am used to waiting 1 second between changes. In the meantime someone else has already gotten python, and pygame working on the machine. Which is great! As soon as ...