A Series of Tubes

My blog’s theme died for a bit yesterday and today. Should be working again now 🙂

I’m working some more on zPhoto, trying to get a stained glass filter working… More on that when it happens.

I’ve gotten back into Flash (I got a cheap-o copy of Flash 5 back when it was only 1 version old…), and am currently writing a basic game engine in Actionscript. It’s difficult, but I’ve already made more progress than the last time I tried to do this, where I worked for about a week and I never got jumping working. I just need to tweak it a bit so the guy doesn’t bounce down the slopes, but slides. Throw in some animation, and presto! A basic game. Then I need enemies, bosses, items, netcode, etc. etc. etc. The whole thing was inspired by The Fancy Pants Adventure, a really good flash game where you run around and off ramps and stuff. I’m not aiming for that kind of quality, that game is amazing. Half that quality would be my best work ever.

Well, now that I have Windows Vista it’s time for a review. So far I like Vista a lot, it’s very shiny and good-looking. Many things are still the same as with XP, and some stuff is left over that doesn’t even do anything (ClearType options are still there, but they do nothing). So far I’ve only used a few programs that are incompatible with Vista. They were the Boot Camp drivers (made for XP, some don’t work that hot in Vista…) and (sadly) Trillian. The first time I ran it, Vista complained that Trilly couldn’t use Aero, so it disabled Aero for the whole system while Trilly is open. Even though I have now set Trilly to run without Aero, Vista still turns the glass effects (which are über cool, by the way) off when I launch it. Oh well, I’ll figure it out eventually.

The biggest problem I’ve had so far is (I think) due to the airport card drivers. It doesn’t seem to recognize my wifi at all, since my wifi doesn’t always broadcast its name. In OS X, you just tell it to connect to the name and it does, but in Vista you can only add the network to your list of automatic networks and wait for it to find it. Since it never finds the network, it won’t connect, and since there’s no way to manually connect to a network without a broadcasting name, I’m basically screwed.

Also, I’d like to be able to use my Boot Camp partition through Parallels, so I can try out Coherence and use Trillian in OS X, but I can’t figure out how to use a Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine. Does anyone know how to do this?

Today I made my first Cocoa-based App for OS X. It’s called PieText.app, and is a very very simple text editor. It’s features are rich text, printing, a ‘clear all text’ button, and a special limited edition button, the Pie button. It prints a special message in the document.

It’s extremely basic, yes, but I figured out how to use XCode and make this app using this tutorial and this one. They are very well written and illustrated, and best of all, there are no prerequisites to doing them, no coding skillz or anything, they will teach you what you need to know.

There’s only two so far, but there’s a (not so) subtle hint that he’ll write more if people donate money to him.