Grammerjack

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.10 b1, comes with a nice selection of desktop backgrounds. This makes a huge difference in how beginners perceive the product, at very little cost to Ubuntu. The new dark-brown default color scheme is also an improvement over the older schemes.

Now that the Android Native Development Kit has been released, I was finally able to publish the sources and binary to my Android Terminal Emulator . It's a fairly plain Digital Equipment Corporation VT-100 terminal emulator, with some features from newer terminals (like colors.) This is my first application in the Android Market. There are at least 10 other terminal emulators in the market; we'll see how this one is received. A bit of history: This was my first Android application. I wrote it for the original "Sooner" Android devices, and have kept it updated for the successive generations of devices. It requires native code because there's no public Android Java APIs for dealing with PTYs. A bit of ancient history: I wrote two terminal emulators for the Atari 800 back in the day: Chameleon, in 6502 assembly, and a version of Kermit in the excellent "Action!" programming language. Kermit was one of my first "open source" programs. If you poke ...

I've just published the source code to a port of Quake to the Android platform . This is something I did a while ago as a internal test application. It's not very useful as a game, because there hasn't been any attempt to optimize the controls for the mobile phone. It's also awkward to install because the end user has to supply the Quake data files on their own. Still, I thought people might enjoy seeing a full-sized example of how to write a native code video game for the Android platform. So there it is, in all its retro glory. (Porting Quake II or Quake III is left as an exercise for the reader. :-) What's different about this particular port of Quake? Converted the original application into a DLL Android applications are written in Java, but they are allowed to call native languge DLLs, and the native language DLLs are allowed to call a limited selection of OS APIs, which include OpenGL ES and Linux File I/O. I was able to make the game work by using Java for: T...