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Sep 23 2000
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BeOS programs
Night and Day is my first officially
released program. It is a small preferences panel that
automatically changes the desktop according to the clock.
Version : 0.1.2
Bing is IMHO the worst Pong clone
ever. It requires a big amount of CPU power. But it is
so cool...
Version : 0.4b2
MediaInfo is a small utility that
allows to display various bits of information the
BMediaFile/BMediaTrack API provides. While probably
not very useful for end users, it can be quite handy
for developers.
Version : 0.3
bf is a minimalist
and useless language, that's extremely hard to
program with, and definitely not intended for real-world
usage
Version : 0.1.1
Useless Memory Monitor is a small
utility that displays memory usage with a smoothly
anti-aliased graph.
Version : 0.9
Why was it so long? (aka "aborted projects")
Very good question! I've had some BeOS machines since
January 1996, and did not release anything until November 1998.
Here's a basic history of what happened:
- Fractal Factory
- This was my first real BeOS program,
in February-April 1996 (Dr5, Dr6, Dr7).
This was a school project, and was my first serious program
written in C/C++.
I did not know much about OO-programming, which is why the
GUI was using some non-standard nasty buttons instead of the
nice and easy-to-use BeOS controls.
I was discovering threads as well, and did not manage to
really benefit from SMP, except when calculating several
pictures at the same time.
Fractal factory proved to have too many bugs and limitations
to be upgradable, and I have currently not done any new
fractals on the BeOS.
- Sokoban
- As soon as the BeOS supported 32bpp display,
I began working on a game. At that time (July 1996, Dr7), there
was no BWindowScreen, and (of course) no BDirectwindow.
Sokoban was a game which was easy to re-program from scratch
without having to port any code, and its standard levels
were very well designed and freely available. I spent much
time developing the display routines, which featured shadows,
alpha-channel and anti-aliasing. Unfortunately I lost most
of it in a nasty system crash, and did not feel like re-doing
it all. I now know that floppies are not reliable and make
several backups of my work in defferent places.
- Full-screen things
- When Dr8 was available, I began
playing around with the BWindowScreen. I experimented a lot,
was often very unhappy about the results, and found that
I was not able to do something that I liked from my dual-66
BeBox. Upgrading to Dual-133 helped, but I was spending so
much time on other things that I didn't really develop
anything. I finally hacked a small shoot'em up game, with some
potentially nice display tricks (I had had no graphics
drawn for it). The project disappeared when PR came out,
because the BWindowScreen had been severely mutilated in PR.
- More Full-screen things
-
Since approximately October 1997 (PR2), I've been playing again
with the BWindowScreen. I developed many test programs, to
see if I would be able to develop some demos for the BeOS.
My programs have been growing better and better, and I hope
to be able to release something for R4 (There are several
problems with the R3 drivers, which are harmless to most
programs, but cause much trouble to a demo coder.)
- Lots of BeOS programming
-
BeOS programming has been my full-time job since April 1998.
While being able to turn your hobby into your job seems like
a very cool idea, it also means that you don't have any hobby
left. It's not as easy to come back home and do some BeOS
programming after a full day of BeOS programming as after
a full day of bio-chemistry classes. This is why I don't
do much programming at home, and the little that I do is often
related to what I do at work.
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