Zovirl Industries

A couple weekends ago I wanted to play around with some game ideas, to see if they were super-awesome or boring. I needed a simple framework to prototype them on, so I whipped one out using pygame. Then I sketched up some art. And made an installer.

And totally forgot to play around my original game ideas.

Damn. Maybe next time.

Anyway, here it is: a simple scrolling demo made with python and pygame. It has no real purpose (unless you want to do scrolling in pygame).

OSX
Windows
Source (Linux)

Organizing bookmarks is too hard. Does Backcountry Maps go under Maps or Backpacking? Does Hot Library Smut go under Libraries or Pornography? And how am I supposed to keep my bookmarks synched across 5 computers? I’m a busy guy, I don’t have time to figure this stuff out.

That’s why I’ve wanted to use del.icio.us for a long time. I was really excited when they announced their import tool. A few minutes later I was staring at 1000 poorly tagged bookmarks. Oops, should’ve cleaned them up before importing. After failing to find any way to batch process the mess, I dejectedly went back to my hierarchy.

I checked again today and there’s still no “Delete All” (the FAQ helpfully suggests canceling & remaking my account). Time to do it myself. I looked at the API docs (oh, I see, I’m not supposed to flood the server…) and grabbed pydelicious. Fired up ipython and had my bookmarks deleted in no time. Sharing all of my bookmarks turned out to be simple too: Since pydelicious doesn’t seem to understand private bookmarks [1] it shares everything. Changing my mind and deciding that I really should have tagged all my new bookmarks “import” (oops, again) was similarly easy. Hooray!

[1] It is unfortunate that the del.icio.us team doesn’t provide up-to-date libraries in a few languages. In a lot of ways I think that officially maintained libraries are an ideal answer to the SOAP vs. REST arguments

I hate it when a poorly-behaved SDL app (usually mine) grabs the mouse, crashes, and doesn’t give the mouse back. Great, now I’m stuck in X with no mouse. Here’s a handy python script to get it back:

Some resources for using XCode with Python. A few introductory sites plus the ones I find most useful on a day-to-day basis:

• XCode, Apple’s free IDE for OSX.
• PyObjC, the Python bindings for Cocoa
• Apple’s introduction to PyObjC
• PyObjC’s Documentation page
• Example projects for PyObjC
• The PyObjC NEWS file is a good place to glean tidbits you can’t find in the PyObjC documentation.
• A simple decimal->hex converter I wrote, if you want to see a minimal PyObjC program

Here are a few hints about how I set up XCode for Python development.

Run your program from XCode

Some versions of PyObjC have a bug so when you make new projects, XCode doesn’t know how to run them. Make a new custom executable & point it build/Development/myProgram.app.

No, don’t quit!

Having the keyboard shortcut to quit XCode be the same shortcut as quitting your application (cmd-Q) is a recipe for annoyance when you accidently hit it twice. Instead, go into XCode’s preferences and change the key binding to quit XCode to something like cmd-option-Q.

Faster builds

You can shave a second or two off the build-test-fix cycle if you set up a dummy “No Build” target. The Development build target will run every time but behind the scenes it isn’t copying files, it is just making aliases (py2app’s –alias option). Set up a new shell script target which runs /usr/bin/true and you can save the effort.

You have no debugger, but at least use PDB

If you set the USE_PDB environment variable, PyObjC will dump you at a PDB prompt when there is an unhandled exception. You can set this on the “Arguments” tab of the custom executable.