Author Archive
Thursday, January 25th, 2007
… If you use a Logitech mouse you already got it! The company now officially made it clear on their support forums that there will be no support for Mouseware for Windows Vista. Instead they point their customers to use the generic mouse driver that ships with Vista. But have they told you that the mouse movement is much slower with that one, even on highest speed? Or that the middle mouse button will not work? I like my MX310 and don’t plan to buy a new one just for Vista because this mouse fits like a glove. The same goes for my soundcard. M-Audio hasn’t made any official statement about a Vista driver so far.
One might thank Microsoft for this mess because of their ridicolous protection mechanisms but then again companies like Wacom prove that developing Vista drivers for existing hardware isn’t impossible. Seems like Logitech jumped onto the ‘all new and shiny’ banwagon by presenting their newest Vista supporting products instead of writing some drivers for their existing customers! Oh right! I forgot to tell them that some customers like me are left handers and don’t want to use an ergonimic right hander mouse!
No Vista for me until this driver mess has seriously improved, and definitely no Logitech products for me for a while, thanks!
Filed under Misc | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
While the whole world is hyping Rich Internet Applications, I’m sitting here in my lab and could not bother less! Flex is really neat and who says that it’s only useful for shopping- or flight-ticket booking systems?! Nobody? Good! I’m using Flex to develop my game development Middleware, i.e. editors like the TileSetTool that I’m working on (if I’m not working on the hexagon framework what I’m doing most of the time). When Flex2 was still really fresh I’ve pondered to use Java for this instead but as it turned out, ActionScript 3 is fast enough for most of my desired operations.
So for now this TileSetTool can be used to convert my (custom format) tileset XML files and their belonging tileset image files into combined tsc file which are compressed and saved to disk by the tool (using Zinc). This editor is probably just the first stage to a much more versatile tilemap editor. The tool uses parts of the hexagon framework which also will contain a tile engine to support the tilesets and maps.
It’s fantastic how quick you can knock an application out of the ground with Flex and AS3 while others are still fighting with their IDE.
You can click the image to see a full screenshot of the tool. In case you’re wondering … no, I’m not working on a Flash version of Uridium 2 (would be an idea though). The tileset is only for testing purposes.
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 7 Comments »
Thursday, December 28th, 2006
Filter Forge is a new software for Windows that allows creating Photoshop filters in a tree node based editor. Yep, thats right! You design filters by connecting components together with virtual wires. Imagine the possibilities! The application ships with a standalone tool as well as a Photoshop PlugIn and after you played around a bit with the trial version you might want to file this tool under “apps with that I could spend the whole day long, experimenting with it”!
(more…)
Filed under Design, Random Picks | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 26th, 2006
Still think Windows Vista is a great OS? It might look great but whats going on under it’s shiny surface? Peter Gutmann has written an extensive article about Vista’s underlying content protection systems. If you plan to use Vista, read it! And then think again!
Quote: “The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel.”
Filed under Misc | 6 Comments »
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
I’m getting some strange kind of Spam recently. Check out my Photoshop Script Positing! Around every week I’m getting one or two comments saying “great script!” or something similar and the URL obviously point to sites that have nothing to do with design or somebodies personal website. Instead they look like marketing websites. At first I didn’t realize it is Spam but it became more and more obvious.
So far these comments don’t annoy me as they are very subtle and few but if it continues with these ‘camouflaged’ thank you comments it makes me wonder if man or machine is on the other side.
Filed under Misc | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
Here are some hints on how I organize my Eclipse workspace that you might find interesting if you want to keep all the stuff together in one workspace, not only the projects but also shared classes, API docs and default Ant build files.
I’m only using one workspace for all projects, no matter what technology they’re using. I’ve heard others are using one dedicated workspace for every technology and that’s fine too but I find it more practical to just use one for all. I’ve created three sub folders in the workspace named .classes, .default and .docs. Note the period at the beginning of the name. This keeps them listed before all other folders (unless you name your projects with a starting period).
The .classes folder contains subfolders for every technology (or language) I use, namely as2, as3, haxe and java. From there on the ongoing structure depends on the language. For as2 I have folders like additional, mm7, mm8, mtasc, zinc etc. For as3 I only have additional and and swc. The additional folder contains all kinds of third party packages, the swc folder only contains swc files etc. whereas for as2 the mtasc folder only contains the classes that ship with MTASC etc. Here’s a diagram of the structure …
(more…)
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 4 Comments »
Friday, November 24th, 2006
While reading Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns I’ve once again came across the AS 3.0 Singleton solution that has to deal with the absence of private constructors (I’ll save my rage and cursings about who had the idea to remove them for now ;)) and while the authors are using the already well known method of using a SingletonEnforcer class outside the Singleton’s package to verify that the class cannot be instanciated via the constructor they also note that this can be doublecrossed by giving null or undefined as a constructor parameter. As this is rather sub optimal I was wondering why they don’t just check inside the Singleton constructor for a null/undefined argument and throw an exception accordingly?!
I’m sure somebody else had the same idea already but here’s my idea of a waterproof Singleton class that cannot be misused from the outside (As always, if I missed any detail that accidentally breaks hell loose feel free to correct me) …
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| package
{
public class WaterproofSingleton {
static private var _instance:Singleton;
public function Singleton(singletonEnforcer:SingletonEnforcer) {
if ((singletonEnforcer as SingletonEnforcer) == null) {
throw (new Error("Direct instantiation of a Singleton is not allowed!"));
}
}
public static function getInstance():Singleton {
if (Singleton._instance == null) {
Singleton._instance = new Singleton(new SingletonEnforcer());
}
return Singleton._instance;
}
}
}
class SingletonEnforcer {} |
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 6 Comments »
Friday, November 24th, 2006
Some links to nine articles about the topic on ‘becoming an Independent Game Developer‘, found via Digg. Some more interesting, some less, the last one from a Mac perspective. There seems to be a lot of discussion about if it turns out to be paying off or not etc., in short, things that don’t interest me that much, I’m just creating games because I have fun doing it and I like the practical side, I’m more of a hobbyist! Either way, here are the links …
Introversion
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer.net
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
Zoombapup
BoneBroke
They Came from Hollywood
gusmueller
Filed under Misc | No Comments »
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006
I’ve been reading this book by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson since yesterday and thought I’d loose a couple of words about it …
The book starts with a chapter about application design where it explains how to go through the analysis-, design- , implementation and testing phase. It introduces how to utilize Use Case- and Class Diagrams and then gives a lesson on how to use FlexUnit for unit testing. In the second chapter is a good explanation about why and how to use Interfaces (instead of Inheritance) and after that it goes into detail with teaching nine of the more common Design Patterns, namely MVC, Singleton, Factory/Template Method, Proxy, Iterator, Composite, Decorator, Command, Memento and State. In part 3 of the book you’ll find in-depth information about AS 3.0 features like Events, data IO, E4X and Regular Expressions.
(more…)
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006
“…Once you activate the product, then you would assume that you are golden to go ahead and use the product, right? Wrong.
You see, even after you activate the software it will, according to
the EULA, “from time to time validate the software, update or require
download of the validation feature of the software”. It will once again
“send information about the…version and product key of the software,
and the internet protocol address of the device”.
Here’s where it gets hairy again. If for some reason the software
“phones home” back to Redmond, Washington, and gets or gives the wrong
answer - irrespective of the reason - it will automatically disable
itself. That’s like saying definitively, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I
can’t do that…”
… So basically add some regular activation annoyances to your almost weekly Windows security updates to keep you from working on the PC!
Read more here … Vista’s EULA product activation worries | The Register
Need more reasons to switch to Mac or Linux?!
Filed under Misc | 2 Comments »
