Live from Austin!

RedPill 1.4.2 is out. Adds Tiger compatibility. I haven’t upgraded to Tiger myself yet, so let me know if you find any problems…

I was quite amused by the guy who wrote saying he was trying to get the source code to work under Tiger, and confessed that he didn’t know any C and could I help him? Right, yeah, I’ll do that.

Also, yes, I know Tiger doesn’t include StuffIt. I didn’t pack it using StuffIt, I packed it as a bzipped disk image with welcome dialog, but the guys at info-mac apparently have a policy that all such things must be unpacked and repacked with StuffIt.

Source code is at info-mac too.

Spent most of Sunday afternoon hacking on ElectricSheep to try and get it working on OS X again. One of the developers had e-mailed me asking if I could help. It turns out that the OS X version was developed as a ground-up reimplementation, which isn’t exactly ideal from a maintenance point of view. I’m trying to improve that a bit.

Red Pill 1.0 hit info-mac and MacUpdate, and the early reviews are in…

OK, new screensaver early beta now available for download for a limited time only. Requires OS X 10.2, unfortunately.

The actual animation is by no means finalized; think of this as a demonstration of the sort of things the finished screensaver might do.

You might be wondering why on earth I’d want to make yet another screensaver inspired by That Movie. Well, I got some e-mail from someone who suggested it. I pointed out the various attempts already available, but he managed to convince me that they weren’t good enough, and that SnowSaver did a much better job than any of them at dealing with the “things drifting down the screen” part of the problem.

Of course, that still left the rest of the problem to deal with. There followed a great deal of frame-by-frame examination of movie footage and hand-drawing and optimizing of symbols. There was also the minor detail of writing just over 1,500 lines of Cocoa code, which includes a particle system, an OpenGL text library, and a couple of state machines… Generally speaking, the project has obeyed Hofstadter’s Law.

My web site’s down again. I’ve checked the logs and found out why: another 68,000 people downloaded my screensaver this month alone. That means well over 100,000 have downloaded it since I released it.

I just can’t afford to keep paying for that kind of bandwidth unless I make the thing shareware, so I’ve submitted it to info-mac, and I’ll be removing it from my web site temporarily. Please feel free to pass copies to friends or put up mirror copies while I wait for info-mac to do their stuff.

I’m submitting SnowSaver to Info-Mac. That should hopefully get it mirrored all over the globe within the next day or so.

I wish I had somewhere I could keep a 12′ hovercraft. I’ve always thought how cool it would be to have a hovercraft.

It seems like SnowSaver has problems on Radeon and old GeForce Ti video cards. In fact, I’m starting to think that the whole multi-screen thing is a red herring, and the real problem is people with video cards that don’t support 24 bit video with 8 bit alpha, hardware texture mapping and fog.

I’m also realizing that I don’t really want to put much more time into it right now. So I’ll probably just clean up a few other minor issues and make that the final 1.1 release.

Spent the afternoon and early evening improving the screensaver and learning my way around Cocoa better. (As opposed to cocoa butter, which would probably have been much more enjoyable if used appropriately.) I now have a preferences sheet with various sliders and a color selector, and code to load and save preferences in the correct way. In the process, I triggered yet another bug; tracking it down revealed yet another way in which the reality of the screensaver API differs from the documentation. This in turn has suggested a possible cause for the “textures vanishing when returning from full screen preview” bug, which I’ll investigate tomorrow.

Also on the agenda for tomorrow is gluing together the parameters set by the preferences dialog, and the actual OpenGL snowflake animation code. Should be reasonably trivial, and while I’m in there I plan to try adding a couple more snowflake textures.

Once all that works, it’ll be 1.1b1. (1.0 was the same as 1.0rc2, for those who are keeping track, but I’m not going to bother making a separate renamed release.) Assuming 1.1b1 works for everyone else, I’ll probably go straight to 1.1 and announce it on MacUpdate and VersionTracker.

Anyway, by 19:00 my brain was shutting down from excessive programming. I was unable to engage in conversation; in fact, I was pretty much unable to engage with the outside world at all. I wonder if I was always like this when I was hacking code all day back in the early 90s? Probably, unfortunately. I suspect that being a highly productive programmer requires a state of mind which isn’t altogether healthy.

We went to the Rosebud, I ate fish since my body was craving it. (Listen to the body, sometimes it knows what it needs and will tell you.) I made a swift return to the human race. We came back, and with the aid of coffee I fixed the aforementioned bug. I rewarded myself with a couple of mince pies and a movie.

One of the disadvantages of NetFlix is that months can elapse between adding a DVD to your queue, and actually watching that DVD. So I know that somebody, somewhere recommended that I watch Gun Shy, but I no longer have any idea who. Anyhow, it was moderately funny, but a bit too tense to be completely enjoyable. I’d probably give it 3/5.