Space Naval Wargame Project: Full Thrust
September 12, 2008 § 1 Comment
I’ve been thinking for a while about building a simple wargame as a way to try out various new technologies I’m experimenting with. A gamer friend of mine recently told me about Full Thrust, which seems like an ideal candidate. My initial thought is to implement a RESTful back-end using Google App Engine (since it is hosted for free), and perhaps attempt simple front ends in SproutCore, Shoes, HotCocoa, and the iPhone SDK.
No promises, but watch this blog (and the git repository Assembla developer portal) for future efforts. And let me know if you’d like to help!
ShoesFest 2008: Getting Started
July 10, 2008 § 1 Comment
A big thank you and welcome to everyone who’s joining the Shoes community for ShoesFest 2008. On Friday, July 11th and 25th (local times vary), we are encouraging people with or without programming experience to join us in creating and running Shoes programs on Mac, Windows, and Linux so they can email us with feedback about:
- crashers
- platform compatibility issues
- performance bottlenecks
- confusing, missing, or under-documented APIs
Here’s Ten Steps for making the most of your involvement in ShoeFest, whether for one hour or twenty-four:
- Download Shoes for Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux
- Read _why’s answers to common questions
- Use an IRC client to join the discussion on irc://irc.freenode.net#shoes
- Try one of the Shoes Tutorials people have written
- Read and run a few of the included samples, or programs from The Shoebox
- Scan Nobody Knows Shoes, and review the poster of the most common APIs
- Use `shoes -m` to bring up the manual (On OS X, you can do ⌘-?)
- Modify/extend an existing app to try out particular APIs or techniques
- Write your own Shoes app. It could illustrate use of a particular API, replicate a similar app on another platform, or just be something you’ve always wanted to write
- File bugs by emailing shoes AT code.whytheluckystiff.net; copy why AT whytheluckystiff.net if you’d like to be permanently added to that mailing list
7/11 & 7/25 ShoesFests with Why The Lucky Stiff
June 27, 2008 § 3 Comments
- Friday, July 11th noon GMT to Saturday, July 12th noon GMT
- Friday, July 25th noon GMT to Saturday, July 26th noon GMT
< 8 AM New York / 5 AM San Francisco / 9 PM Tokyo / 3 PM Amsterdam >
The goal of these events is to write and share fun little applications using Shoes, a clever little cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Ruby. This will allow us to test, document, and file bugs on how the various Shoes features work on the different supported platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in preparation for our next major release on July 31st, 2008.
No Ruby — or programming — experience is required; we’d love to find out how easy it is for novices to learn Shoes! Of course, if you happen to know the Ruby C API, expert help is always appreciated.
The primary interaction will take place on the Shoes IRC channel: #shoes on irc://irc.freenode.net
You can participate using any of the many web– and native– apps for IRC.
Shoes comes with its own built-in manual. Use `shoes -m` to bring it up. (On OS X, you can do ⌘-?.)
Additional Resources:
- The latest Shoes binaries for Mac/Windows/Linux
- The Shoebox, a friendly place to share Shoes (and Ruby-Processing) apps in peace and harmony
- Hackety Hack, the programming tutor that motivated Shoes
- Nobody Knows Shoes, the introductory guide
Spread the word! Everybody could use a nice set of Shoes. 🙂
iHack, therefore iBlog 