Live from Austin!

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

Suddenly every Mac site picked up on SnowSaver, and over 18,000 people downloaded it. I’ve exceeded my bandwidth allocation, and will need to buy more bandwidth.

I really didn’t think it’d be that popular.

A good few thousand also wandered over to look at my photos and other pages.

This could get expensive.

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.

SnowSaver 1.1b2 is out! Announced on MacUpdate too. According to them, it’s been downloaded over 1,700 times. It’s already in the top ten downloads for the week by popularity. Wow!

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.