Silly Drawing Layer? Super-Duper Loveliness? Someone Did Loads?

Well, no-one really knows what it stands for. But it is in fact the main reason I came here today with a view to posting.

SDL, or Stupid Digital Lollipop, is essentially Pygame for C++. Well, in truth, Pygame is Slimy Duck Lice for Python; Someone's Dung-Ledge is the original module. And now that I've gained some sort of coding ability in C++, I decided now would be the time to learn Scary Doodling Lithuanians. As it turns out, Scale-Drawn Lithium is quite hard. Yes, Splendidly Drunken Leige is very hard indeed.

As I'm running out of acromym ideas, I believe now would be a good time to tell of my SDL ventures thus far. Well, I decided a few days ago that I would start trying to make graphical programs in C++ instead of just console-driven ones. Firstly, I tried out wxWidgets (which spawned the awesome wxPython). Unfortunately, I couldn't even get as far as include "wx/wx.h", as MinGW (the compiler I'm using) simply refused to include it - perhaps I compiled it incorrectly, perhaps I put it in the wrong place, perhaps my system variable was dodgy; whatever the cause, it simply wasn't going to happen. So, having failed at the first wxHurdle, I decided that as Pygame is the graphics module in which I am most comfortable I should probably give SDL a go.

This ended up being an absolute unholy 'mare to install as well, but to a slightly lesser degree - I got it installed eventually! And so, having followed the obligatory "Hello World" tutorial, I now proudly present to you the fruits of my labour:


Awesome, no? Well, it's kinda cool if you've seen the source code - over 100 lines went into this simple marriage of two images on-screen. Admittedly, many of those lines were expended in superfluous comments and whitespace, but it's still gigametres away from the ~10-line Pygame version.

More updates on my progress will follow, so watch this space: " ".
WATCH IT.



It might do an amusing trick.

Exesoft ToyBox

I was messing around in physics this morning getting bored while copying out some stuff in fiberoptics and I wrote a little crystal ball program in python (in my book). The moment I got home I wrote it up and decided to bundle it with the random story generator and a Work in Progress, AutoRap. The crystal ball is a really simple console application like the story generator and auto rap. CrystalBall works by randomly choosing a yes/no type answer from a list and displaying it after user input. We/I might make some nice little interfaces for theese little apps. I hope to release theese soon and add to them in the future. The ExeSoft Toy Box will be updated when we take breaks from the larger apps and do some quick collab code.

-James

ShinyPic is here!

After many tiresome hours of bugfixing, we at ExeSoft finally come bearing The Shiniest Image Viewer In The Known Universe, ExeSoft ShinyPic version 1.0


Download links can be found at exesoft.co.nr/shinypic. Enjoy!

Finishing touches...

We're now getting incredibly close to the final release of ShinyPic. All the features have been implemented, and all that remains is to polish a few of them up and hunt for bugs. The first few test compiles have been very successful, and I've managed to make a nifty little icon for the program in GIMP.

If all goes to plan, installer files and source code should be going up by the end of the weekend!

So we took a break...

David and I got together earlier on today and did a little small collaboration on a program. It is a fun little thing that generates random sentences and paragraphs from a set of words. I will try and create a little program that will allow you to add your own sentence structures and add your own words. We may make a simple GUI for it but at the moment it is a console based thing that allows saving to a file. To find the code click here > http://pasteall.org/2478/python < Have a play around with it and feel free to post funny paragraphs in the comments section. Right now we are back to work on getting ShinyPic ready for the first release.

-James