About
Various bits of code I’ve written and which are available free to use under liberal terms. Unless otherwise specified, the code can be found at GitHub or Google Code – a gradual transition to GitHub is under way.
I mostly code for Mac OS X, but some of the code is intended to be cross-platform.
If you feel a pressing urge to shout at me, you can use this e-mail address, which changes from time to time.
Mac OS X – High Level
Oolite
An Elite-like space shooter. I’m the current project lead, having taken over from Giles Williams some time ago. GPL 2.0 with numerous MIT/X11 license components.(Hosted at BerliOS)
Redline Tools
A set of tools for working with plug-ins for Ambrosia Software’s Redline. MIT/X11 license.- Plug-in Splitter for Redline: a drag-and-drop tool to unpack Redline plug-in archives.
- Plug-in Mounter for Redline: a tool to mount Redline plug-ins like disk images (using MacFUSE).
- redlinesplit: command-line equivalent of Plug-in Splitter.
- Map Viewer for Redline: a tool for examining Redline maps in 3D.
- RedlineHackKit: a set of reusable classes used in the above.
Mac OS X – Libraries and Snippets
JAValueFromString
A tool to automatically describe (almost) any Objective-C variable, including primitives and variables, without the need to write a correct format string and extract fields. For example,NSRect foo = {{1, 2}, {3, 4}}; JA_DUMP(foo); will log foo = { { 1, 2 }, { 3, 4 } }.
MIT/X11 license. Hosted on GitHub. See also: this blog entry.
JAMultiTypeSavePanelController
A class to manage an NSSavePanel with a pop-up menu for choosing types. Uses modern, spiffy UTIs. MIT/X11 license. Hosted on GitHub. See also: this blog entry.
KeyNaming
A library for generating descriptive strings from virtual key codes. Also has experimental support for USB HID usage codes for keyboards. MIT/X11 license.
KeyFromQWERTY
A simple library to convert character values to corresponding key codes using a predefined keyboard layout (that is, it does not use the current keyboard layout; by default is uses the U.S. layout, but tools to generate different versions are included). This can be used to hard-code default key bindings when you want to bind to physical key location rather than character value. Use KeyNaming to get an appropriate display string for a key code.MIT/X11 license. Hosted on GitHub. See also: this blog entry.
Cross-Platform – Libraries and Snippets
S3TCDecompression
When I added texture conversion to redplugsplit, I needed a library for decompressing S3TC DXT3 textures. I couldn’t find one, so I wrote my own based on the S3TC code in DevIL. Public domain (with the permission of the DevIL crew).
Note: while it nominally supports other S3TC codecs (DXT1, DXT2, DXT4 and DXT5), it has currently only been tested on DXT3 textures.
Note 2: this code may be patent-encumbered. In particular, United States Patent 6,940,511 defines the decompression algorithm for the S3TC formats, but may only apply to specific uses. I am not your patent lawyer; if you wish to deploy this code in the United States or other countries which allow software patents, you should get legal advice.
GLSL Bindings Sample
An example of using Objective-C’s dynamism and introspection to bind object properties to GLSL shader uniforms. Why is this listed as cross-platform? Well, it’s based on code from a cross-platform game, Oolite, so clearly Objective-C and the Foundation framework qualify as cross-platform. See this blog entry for a description.
JAPriorityQueue
I needed a priority queue for Oolite, and Foundation doesn’t provide one. Mike Ash provides an implementation which wraps the STL, and (as I pointed out there) CoreFoundation provides CFBinaryHeap. However, I needed this to work under GNUstep, which doesn’t play nice with Objective-C++, and I didn’t want to introduce a dependency on CFLite. So here’s an Objective-C implementation. MIT/X11 license. See also: this blog entry.