Chris McCormick

Over the new-year I wrote this little Free Software (LGPL) app for sketching stuff. It's called SketchThing.

With the impending proliferation of tablets and touchscreens my plan is to make a sketching app which runs on all kinds of tablet/touch friendly devices and browsers, online and offline, and will sync your sketches to whatever device you are using, wherever you are using it.

At the moment it's running on those Apple portable devices, since that's what I have access to thanks to my contract work for RjDj, and I'm quite glad that I have found a way to make Free Software which runs on those devices legally through the web app method. I hope to port it to at least Firefox, Android, and Chrome OS as well.

The core library, sketchthing.js, is device agnostic and should run on anything which supports HTML5, such as Firefox and Webkit. What the library does is take an arbitrary HTML element as an input, and then replace it's innerHTML with a canvas of the same size which can be sketched upon.

Have fun.

Three bits of news to do with Infinite 8Bit Platformer.

• I finally found some time and motivation to work a little bit on it. I made some icons to replace the ugly text buttons and had to write an image based radio-button class to support that. Here's a half-size screenshot of the new icons:

• I've decided to release the source code to the game under a GPL license. Some of the library code which I've used in other projects will be released under an LGPL license. You can find bzr repositories of both codebases here.

• I am looking for contributors to help me bring the game to completion along the lines of my massively-multiplayer-user-created-content-platformer vision. If you're interested in joining the effort, email me and I'll put you on the dev mailing list we have going. Feel free to check out the code, look at the TODO list and start hacking. Patches welcome!

I really need to do a lot more work on the website, like integrating a forum, blog feeds, and authentication. Next thing in the TODO list is a save button for saving the level you are working on. Should be pretty easy so I'm going to use it to try and stay engaged with the codebase.

Woohoo, Ullrich von Bassewitz has made a new release of everyone's favorite 8bit compiler, cc65 - the first in a while.

cc65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502 machines, including

• The Commodore VIC20, C16/C116, C64, C128, C116, Plus/4, 510 (aka P500), the 600/700 family and newer PET machines (not 2001).

• The Apple ][ and successors.

• The Atari 8 bit machines.

• GEOS for the C64 and C128.

• The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

• The Supervision console.

• The Oric Atmos.

• The Lynx Console.

This is the compiler that I used to create aSid, a program which turns your commodore64 into a synthesizer.

The zipfile under the image above contains a Pure Data patch which procedurally generates a virtually infinite number of acid and breakbeat loops. I've found that it's quite a lot of fun to play with!

Start by loading the patch called 0_START.pd and then turn up the volume and the cutoff. After that hit the big red button a few times until you hear something you like.

I was making it into an RjDj scene, but I am not really sure if I'll ever get around to finishing it.