Re: hosers-talk: Duh.

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth "Jon Stewart": 
> Bah. Immature l@m3rz think they're real men when they hand code their 
> GUIs. A Real Man invents XML gui-description tags and a parser which
> generates View subclasses from such resource files and tells his lackey to
> fuck with the layout; then the Real Man takes a nap.

Hmm. I don't have any lackeys. Actually, I think I am a lackey right now, 
as a result of my position as a TA. Or perhaps I'm a minion.

> What are you using Gtk for? As in, what's the nature of your project? Do 
> tell, Joel.

Since June or so I've been working on an app for playing board- and 
wargames via email. It consists mostly of a canvas on which you can shuffle 
playing pieces about, and trays in which you can move/sort/store pieces. 
Games are saved in XML, and the GUI bindings are for Gtk. Progress was slow 
for a long time while I was learning Gtk and refreshing my l33t C sk1lz, 
but now I have something that's usable if you don't care about piece 
rotation and flipping and are willing to move pieces about one at a time 
(working on lassoing right now, though). It's amazing how many details 
there are in getting the feel right. After nearly every compile, I've 
noticed something that needs fixing that I wasn't specifically attending to.

Depending how much I work on it in the next few days, I might finish 
implementing all of the features I want by the weekend, in which case I'll 
release version 0.1. (I don't have a name for it, yet, though.) If I don't 
get it to a semi-complete state by the end of the week, though, I'm not 
sure when it will reach that point. That will depend on how often I feel 
like impeding my progress toward a PhD. :)

Also, I would like to roll out a Windows build of it--part of the point of 
doing this is so Nate Ellefson and I can play PoG by email, and he uses 
Windows--but I don't have any such computers on which to test it. There's a 
port of Gtk for Windows, but I have a hard time believing my build will 
work straight off--which means that getting a Windows version going will be 
a giant pain in the ass.

Here's screenshot of the app in action: http://www.nomic.net/~uckelman/board
.jpg
The game loaded in the picture is Battle for Moscow, in case anyone is 
interested.

-- 
J.