It took a lot of sweat and tears, but I finally converted the Kagu kinetic scrolling selection widget to work with GTK.

Check it out.

The biggest problem I've had with Thummim so far is that it's hard to navigate to another book, chapter or verse within a document without using the stylus. It finally got to me enough that I decided I needed a kinetic scroller.

I looked around and didn't see any GPL python GTK widgets that did what I needed, so I set about converting the Kagu kinetic scroll to work in GTK instead of PyGame.

Here's the results:<%image(oss/20070906-kscroller.jpg|400|240|)%>

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A few years ago, I got a comment back from someone about CheckBook Tracker, the personal finance software I wrote for Linux. He had learned I wrote it in Pascal and wondered 'Why didn't you use Python?' I snickered to myself 'a scripting language for a personal finance application? You've got to be kidding me!'

After Apple announced it would not be carrying NBC shows on the iTunes store due to NBC asking 'double the wholesale rate', NBC responded with this little gem:

it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material.

Personally I don't take kindly to being called a thief, first by the RIAA now by NBC. Makes for good marketing, don't you think?

With our fifth child on the way (yeah, I said fifth) that leaves me with finding a way to entertain my five year old while waiting at the doctor's office every two weeks.

After a bit of searching, I found a pretty good implementation of Connect Four using Python that was GPL licensed. It didn't take a lot of modification to have it ready for packaging for Maemo:<%image(oss/20070903-connectfour.jpg|400|291|)%>

What gets me is that his code plays sounds fine on Maemo where I couldn't get the mixer to init in my own software. That warrants a bit more investigation...

It's NOT for the non-technical crowd, but I've posted a working ALPHA version of DragonFear.

Please, report back any crashes, but don't bother reporting 'function X doesn't work' because a LOT of function X's don't work.

<%image(oss/20070901-spiderattack.jpg|400|240|)%>

Read more for the link and notes on the release:Things you can try out:

Menu navigation
Character Generation
New game creation (it asks for what game to start but won't let you choose one - don't worry.)
Movement through the map (very small map I hard coded)

I just implemented something that didn't exist in The Bard's Tale.

A wider perspective view. I know it seems basic when you think about it, but it's really not...In the original Bard's Tale series, you looked down a hallway. If there was a wall that was one game square to the right and down your view, it didn't render because the game did not really handle perspective.

It's time for a break. I worked probably 8 hours a day (in addition to work) last week, plus another 12 hours over the weekend on DragonFear for the n800.

I've posted a video to YouTube of the current functionality of DragonFear. I'd post the code to download, but it's not usable by the average user yet.

Read on for the video. It demonstrates the semi-transparent kinetic scrolling buttons adapted from Kagu, and the new pygame popup keyboard I wrote.

Since I'm working on an application using Pygame for the Nokia n800 I was faced with a way of providing user input of text.

Most games would simply... use the keyboard. Unfortunately for a touchscreen computer with no keyboard that kind of limits you. You can't simply use GTK widgets to display a text input box, because the screen is being rendered using SDL.

So, I developed a very simple touchscreen input virtual keyboard using pygame for the Maemo interface: