A few weeks back, I described an XML Parser Generator that I was working on. At the time, it could generate the parser it used itself. Now, it’s got Objective-C support and Lisp support. (The Lisp support is slightly better than the Objective-C support right now. With the Objective-C backend, you can create arrays of structs, but not arrays of strings or integers.)
Here is the Parser Generator home page.
I just finished up some animal artwork for my iPhone Spelling Toy. I also added translations for Japanese and German (in addition to the English, French, and Spanish that were already there). After I double-check the translations, I will get it uploaded to the App Store.
If you have any expertise in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese, I’d appreciate any feedback you can give me about the words I chose in those languages. Would they be the word one would think of when shown the picture? Thanks, in advance.
Roto Mortar was written for the 2010 LISP Game Design Challenge. The challenge was to design and implement a game in seven days using some LISP dialect.
The KPs have been beating on your base all week. Your defenses are just about to collapse. In fact, your mortar cannons are both on the fritz. Billy Bob, the ACME Repair Guy, has just gotten one of your mortar cannons back online. Unfortunately, he had to wire things a little wonky. Your cannon is spinning all on its own. You’ve only got one button to control both the elevation of the cannon and when to fire it. And, you better fire it, because the KPs are still coming at you.
A few years ago, I read the book Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games. One of the exercises in the first chapter is to design a game with a “one-button interface”. At the time, I didn’t come up with anything particularly thrilling.
When I started brainstorming what to do for this Game Challenge, I remembered that exercise. I came up with this concept just under (as in 3.5 hours under) seven days ago. The game is nowhere near as polished as I’d like… but it was a 7-day thing. And, it was fun to take a break from Objective C to get back to some Lisp programming.
You can find out more about the game, including where to get the source and a Mac OS X binary, on the game’s web page.
Yesterday, I decided to make the images in my article look like they were on old, burnt paper. I did this manually in the GIMP.
I liked the effect, but I didn’t want the tedium of having to do all n steps manually next time I go to use it. So, I wrote a GIMP plugin script to do it.
Here is an example of the plugin script in action. As you can see, I started with a text layer and a selection that was bigger than the text layer. The plugin uses the selection size as original edge of the paper (original, as in before the paper was burned).
And, here is the resulting image:
Here is the Burnt Paper plugin script. Plop this in a directory that’s in your script search path and refresh GIMP’s scripting and then you’ll find it in the Filters > Decor
menu. [You can see the script search path by going to Edit > Preferences
and selecting Scripts
under Folders
in the left sidebar. And, you can refresh the scripts by going to Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh Scripts
.]
I just uploaded the first update to my iPhone Spelling Toy. The update includes two minor changes:
siete(Spanish for
seven)
colores(Spanish for
colors)
Today, I am working on adding animal drawings.
