PlayControl

This holiday break was much like revisiting my roots. I did OpenGL, OpenAL, and now SDL.

I finally got around to finishing one of the zillion things in my queue. With SDL getting closer to its 1.3 release, I felt compelled to get this one done. I have implemented and submitted a new native Mac OS X and also iPhone backend for SDL_image.

SDL_image currently depends on libgif, libjpeg, libpng, and libtiff to load these formats. For the official Mac OS X framework distribution, we have been statically linking these libraries into the framework. This has been a pain to build and maintain, particularly since none of these libraries have Universal Binary friendly build systems.

This submission utilizes native OS X frameworks to load the images…

Recently, I have been getting a lot of similar questions about how to draw geometry in OpenGL without the use of glBegin()/glEnd(). This is mostly due to the interest in iPhone development which uses OpenGL ES 1.1, though I have received a few desktop performance questions as well. Since I've gotten multiple questions, I thought I would post a very simple tutorial for VBOs.

When most people first learn OpenGL, they are taught using glBegin() and glEnd(). But to shock of many people, these functions have been excluded from OpenGL ES, and there is pressure to remove these functions from future versions of OpenGL proper. The two main reasons for removing these functions are performance and simplicity.

In performance, the glBegin()/glEnd()…

Every time a new Apple software update comes out, people always wonder what's really changed. Apple's release notes are usually not very detailed. QuickTime 7.5 which was released the week of WWDC 2008 happened to be a fairly significant update in terms of bug fixes and enhancements.

I was trying to implement a "reflection" of a movie layer using QTKit and Core Animation. I wanted a single movie source and either two movie layers to share the the source, or a way to capture the current displayed image of one layer and transfer it to another. It turns out neither was possible prior to QuickTime 7.5. (You might be able to use to Core Video and OpenGL, but the QuickTime/Core Video API interface still hasn't been updated to support 64-bit…

Not wanting to repeat that mistake again, I have implemented a Git Superproject and Submodules for a real world project that I needed to get fixed. Furthermore, the project is relatively lightweight and potentially cross-platform, so I have designed the example so you can participate too by accessing a public repository.

The project is LuaDoc. It is a documentation generator that is similar to Doxygen, except that it is designed explicitly for Lua. (Doxygen currently lacks Lua…

If anybody has been tracking my blog prior to this point, I apologize. I did not expect anybody to find it. (Google is too efficient at crawling.) Prior to this point, this blog was an experimental test for me and I wasn't yet announcing it publicly.

You might notice that there were a bunch of articles with dates starting from January pushed just today. That's because I started writing those articles back then, but had not finished writing/editing/revising them until today. I figured it was no big deal since nobody has seen my blog. Oops.

Today, I discovered that somebody has indeed been reading my blog (outside my private circle) because somebody left a comment, and a great one too! (More on that in a moment.)

I checked Google Analytics,…

In honor of the upcoming Tax Day, I'm going to gripe. The tax code is unfair and broken. (There, I did it. I don't feel any better.) While there are volumes of reasons to complain (literally), I'm going to focus in on a specific aspect: savings.

A case in point of the unfairness is savings (plain old, non-retirement accounts). The tax code is structured so there is a huge disincentive to save money, particularly for the short term or intermediate term.

You might be trying to save money for an emergency fund, save for a big purchase item such as a car or house, save for a big event such as a wedding, or just trying to plan for the future. But if you try saving for these types of things and your time span is less than the long term (say…

So anybody who knows anything about iWeb 2 probably realizes that this template I'm currently using doesn't exist in iWeb. I'm now trying Sandvox by Karelia instead.

Sandvox is a web site building tool much like iWeb. In fact, it actually launched a little before iWeb was announced so the folks at Karelia had the misfortune of seeing their innovative product suddenly have a direct competitor from Apple almost overnight. Apparently this type of bad luck has happened to them before with a search product called Watson in which Apple soon introduced Sherlock.

Like iWeb, it uses prebuilt templates to do things, and you basically just substitute your own content. From my naive viewpoint, both programs look very similar from a feature set…

For anybody who accidentally stumbles on this, we're trying to organize a continuation of a CMake/Lua experiment. Dr. Ken Martin of Kitware recently decided to try embedding

Lua in CMake.

For those who don't know, CMake is a 'build system generator' or

'meta-build system'. You provide a build description in a simple script like language and CMake generates a (native) project that you request. Among the project types CMake can generate are Visual Studio, GNU Makefiles, Xcode, KDevelop, and more. This allows developers to have one single unified build description, but yet allow people to use their favorite IDEs and build systems. For anybody who is serious about cross-platform development, CMake is a must-look-at.

While CMake's build…

So as I try to think of things to fill in my blog, this is one of the significant ones because this is one of the reasons behind me leaving my anonymity behind.

At CocoaHeads in Silicon Valley some number of months ago, I gave a short demo on using OpenGL shaders to offload processing onto the graphics card. This had been prompted a month earlier by a student who gave a presentation on a Wave Interference program he made for science class. I noticed that the performance suggested it was using fixed pipeline drawing on the video card to render the Wave Interference patterns. I suggested at the time that shaders may make the thing stupidly fast (at the cost of complexity).

Anyway, just to prove to myself that I wasn't full of it, I decided…