Just a small status update since I haven’t posted in a while or updated any of my projects.

The reason for nothing happening, especially over the last 2 weeks is that I’m having a major headache so I can’t do a lot of work right now (not that easy to concentrate when your head explodes ^^). I’ve been on pain killers for a bit over 2 weeks now and the bad thing about pain killers is that you can only take so many a day and they only work for a couple of hours each. So usually I take one and try to get as much work done as possible until the effect wears off (which is just about 3 hours). It isn’t clear yet what the cause of the headache is, but hopefully that will be sorted out this week so that I can finally get some real work done.

On a happier note, I’ve finally got my hands on an iPod Touch (3G, 32 GB) a couple of days ago, yay!

It’s pretty awesome, the only bad thing I can say about it is that it would be better with two speakers like the PSP and that the battery time is awful when playing games. The battery lasts only about an hour and a half when playing 3D games and about 3 hours and a half when playing 2D games (I haven’t measured this myself, but that’s what the battery meter app says).

I haven’t been able to play that much with it (same reason as not getting much work done, headache) but I’ve played a couple of games for about 5 minutes each and I was surprised how good the touchscreen controls work.

This of course means that I’ll start developing some iPhone apps this year, which is why I mentioned this here I’ve developed Mac software for years and already started learning a bit about iPhone developing some time ago so I should be able to start right away. Well, after the headache is gone

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Hopefully it doesn’t look too bad, I’m not a designer The design is probably going to change a bit until I release the game.

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(Don’t mind the sluggish animations, having two Google Wave clients open AND recording a video of that size was too much for my computer, normally the animations are all smooth even on a netbook)

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Here is Match them colors running inside of Google Wave in Firefox 3.5:

(If the video shows an error message, turn on HD. Some mysterious YouTube error… ^^)

I’m working on the Wave integration and on multiplayer game modes now, then the game is ready for a beta release.

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A few days ago I got interested in Processing.js, which is a port of the Processing language to JavaScript + Canvas. Processing is a language based on Java and Processing.js lets your Java code run inside of a Webbrowser by using the new HTML 5 canvas element for display of animations without the need for any kind of plugins. If I would have to describe it, I would say it’s like Flash, but instead of having to pay hundreds of euros every year to develop for it, it’s completely free (and runs fine on Mac and Linux which sadly can’t be said for Flash).

I instantly saw the potential this has for developing Google Wave gadgets (and especially games) and as a small test project I developed a “Hangman” game with it, playable without Wave here: http://www.geekologic.com/hangman/. The Wave version isn’t finished yet because of an issue with displaying text with Processing.js when used in a gadget. Apart from the text issue (which makes the game unplayable in Wave for the moment), it does run fine in Wave though. You can add it to a wave via this url: http://www.geekologic.com/hangman/hangman.xml

Yesterday then I decided to completely rewrite MatchThemColors, the match-3 style game I started developing for Wave a couple of months ago. I hadn’t worked on it for quite a while. Processing.js made programming the game a whole lot easier which is why I was able to completely rewrite everything I had done yesterday and was also able to add falling blocks which the original version didn’t have. The Wave integration for this type of game is a bit complex so that will take me some time but I plan to have a beta version, playable in Google Wave with multiple players, ready in a few days (never trust my release dates though ^^).

Here’s a short video of the current version of the game running inside of the Safari 4 webbrowser:

I’ll continue the work on this over the course of the week and will get back to updating the CountColon Google Wave robot next week.

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Google released a new programming language a couple of days ago, the Go systems programming language.

It’s goals are to combine the speed of a compiled language like C/C++ with the ease of use of a dynamic language like Python. It’s experimental for now and there are obviously next to no libraries available for it. You can wrap C libraries to use with Go but no C++. Also, there is no GUI functionality in the standard library so you are pretty much confined to console apps for the moment. That’s sure to change over time though. With the backing of Google, this language could soon become very popular.

If that’s a good thing or not I can’t say, I am trying to decide between learning Go and D at the moment

Here’s a short Hello World written in Go:

// code is grouped into packages
package main

// imports can be grouped for less typing
import (
	"fmt"; // text formatting
	"rand"; // pseudo random number generators
	"time";
)

func main() {
	rand.Seed(time.Nanoseconds());
	// creating a string array variable
	greetings := [4]string{"world", "from Google Go", "there"};
	// alternative syntax for creating a variable
	var randomNumber int = rand.Intn(3);
	// %v lets Go handle the value type in a formatted string
	fmt.Printf("Hello %v!\n", greetings[randomNumber]);
}

This code compiles to a 616 kb native binary on Linux. Yes, that’s freaking huge but it wouldn’t be better with C/C++ if you had to compile the C Standard Library statically.

Oh, did I mention it’s garbage collected? Google believes it can implement garbage collection in a way that minimizes the downsides.

Quote from the Go Language Design FAQ:

One of the biggest sources of bookkeeping in systems programs is memory management. We feel it’s critical to eliminate that programmer overhead, and advances in garbage collection technology in the last few years give us confidence that we can implement it with low enough overhead and no significant latency. (The current implementation is a plain mark-and-sweep collector but a replacement is in the works.)

It’s only for 32-bit/64-bit X86 and ARM processors right now, no PPC support. Supported operating systems are Linux and Mac OS X. No Windows support. Google hopes someone else ports Go to Windows. Go is BSD licensed.

One feature that is advertised as a huge improvement in Go is that it compiles in seconds. The complete Go source (more than 100.000 lines of code) can be compiled in 8 seconds on a single machine. Common size projects should be able to compile in under a second. See the video for a demonstration.

There are two compilers. The standard Go compiler which offers you this fast compile speeds but produces code that is only “ok” and a GCC frontend which compiles “good” code but takes long to do so. In my opinion I don’t see a problem there. Use the Go compiler while developing and for release, compile the app with GCC. Google did say though that they will improve the code that the Go compiler outputs.

There’s also a hour long Google Tech Talk video about Go:

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A little instructional / introduction video I made for CountColon.

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This is my first Google Wave robot ^^ Just got access to the Google Wave sandbox yesterday (finally!).

There don’t even seem to be that many robots and gadgets yet. All in all there are about 50 gadgets and robots on the official list, so my robot is one of the very first add-ons for Google Wave (yay).

I like the feature that many text editors (at least the good ones) have which shows you statistics about your documents. Stuff like line count, word count, character count and so forth. Google Wave doesn’t have that and nobody (at least not that I know of ^^) wrote a robot that adds this functionality to Wave,  so I did it myself ^^ Was easy enough too which is good since I only know the little bit about Python that I learnt when I started working on a website that runs on Google App Engine.

Here’s how it works (for now):

You write [count: lines] or [count: words] anywhere in your text and then the robot swaps it with the count. That way, you can style the output like you want. You can also do [count: chars] to count characters and I plan to add paragraph counting next. And then I’ll make a command that lets you count occurrences of a word or phrase ^^ And THEN I will make an option that lets the counters update live (at the moment they only update exactly… Once ^^).

Developing robots isn’t that easy right now for two reasons. The documentation is incomplete (and that’s a nice word for it ^^) and you can’t test robots locally which means that you have to develop your robot, upload it to Google App Engine, add it to a Wave in Google Wave, check your App Engine logs for error messages, change your code, upload your code again, …

Also the Python API seems to be missing a few features that the Java API already offers (I haven’t looked at the Java API yet). You can’t for example modify styled text (bold, italic, etc.) with the Python API which means that if you do modify text with a robot written in Python, all styles are lost. I learnt that the hard way with my robot

It’s a lot of fun though ^^ I already have ideas for 5 more projects (robots and gadgets) and I’m sure I’ll get a couple more ideas over the next weeks.

I’ll write about my experience with Wave in another blog post.