Learning Groovy

Groovy looks like a cool thing to know. It looks like it's strictly better than Beanshell. It's a JVM language which is a superset of Java. I'm not planning on using any part of it except that it allows dynamic execution of java code. How cool! I'm expecting to author a scripting language in Groovy that will act as an controller for our application. It's been really easy to setup so far and I like it.

What makes twitter genious?

Twitter really shines when it comes to contrast...

Objective C lesson

After a fair amount of debugging on iD20, I discovered the following. If a UIView (or any other graphical container) has the property 'User Interaction Enabled' set to NO (or FALSE) then it, as well as it's children won't receive any touch events. So don't put your custom component inside of a parent that is blocking touch events.

Crows, the new and improved Ape

Pretty amazing - Crows can combine tools to solve problems.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/clever-crows-complex-cognition.html

Even cooler? Crows use features of the urban landscape to access food they wouldn't otherwise be able to eat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0&feature=related

JavaFx 1.3 released!

17 days after giving up on Java 1.3, it's been released. I may try and migrate FxBattle to 1.3 just to see how the performance goes. If it's much better then perhaps I'll put some work in and polish it up. If I do that, I'll be sure to update here on what the results were.

So far, Objective C is going okay. It has some really nice APIs that just work. The learning curve hasn't been too tough, but I'm far from having a sense of what is elegant and what is ugly. Working with G and R will be fun. I'm looking forward to binding together the Persistance, Import, and Presentation layers and seeing what we come up with.

Abandoning Fx 1.3 for Objective C (iPad for the win!)

So after waiting most of a year for JavaFx 1.3, I'm tired of waiting (as mentioned before). FxBattle is officially on the back burner when Fx 1.3 comes out I may give it another chance, but no guarantees-- I'd rather write something fun on a working and used infrastructure. So what will I be doing?

I talked to my partner in side projects and we're writing an iPad app. Yup, I'm on a whole new band wagon. But this one isn't going to stagnate for the next 10 months. This one is going to be a party (and I hear there's going to be a band).

But what will this new genius app do? It's going to be a very simple tool to help run grid based games like D&D. We'll model a map and markers on that map. Markers can represent monsters and heroes. The map will be grid based and support 'depth'. That's going to be roughly the minimal set of features for the first result.

Later we'll want to add lots of things I'm sure. But for now that should be enough features to be useful for our D&D group. So now all I need is the SDK. But guess what? The newest version won't run on Leopard (my current OS) and the old versions appear to have been nuked. All I want to do in brand myself, why won't Apple(tm) help?

UPDATE: Haven't tried this yet, but found a blog post with direct links to old versions of the iPhone SDK (including versions that will run on OSX Leopard and others).

Tired of waiting for Javafx 1.3

I understand the desire of Oracle to wait to release the next and most pivotal release of JavaFx until they're sure it ready to go. However, I started using Fx at JavaOne 2009. It was a neat tool and a chance to really engage myself at the conference.

A friend and I started writing a video game (FxBattle) that used a bunch of new and interesting Java technologies. We had a multi-threaded server running on Clojure. We used Google's Protocol buffers for our socket level communications. JavaFx was our tool for the client front end and we were using an in house tool called the CoSI to manage dynamic listening between the Fx Client and the Java based client data model.

The development process was very quick and agile for a while. Then we ran the game. The client was brutally slow. This taught me how to hook an Eclipse debugger into a remote process and then how to hook YourKit into a JavaFx app. I believe the slowness is an issue with Bindings causing redraws more frequently than they should.

I could work around this issue, but I'm told that Soma (Fx 1.3) will fix it. When I learned this (several months ago) Soma was to be released in short order. Where is it? I've been thinking that maybe the front end would see more players if I wrote it in Flash. Then at least I'd be learning a technology that was sure to have a future...