Room for one more?

RegExplorer v1.0 released

The first official version of RegExplorer was released today (finally :). See the RegExplorer blog for more details.

RegExplorer screenshot (Mac OS X).

Human space invaders

Wanted - dead or alive

Today I stumpled upon Ultimate Flash Face which is a great online tool for making wanted posters. I played around with it for a few minutes and came up with this fictitious person (perfect look for a Dirty Harry sequel :)

BTW: This picture is not a self-portrait!

You can also spice up the poster and make it more western like using the Wanted Poster Generator.

Pong on steroids

Plasma Pong is a new variation of the good old Pong using real-time fluid dynamics to speed up the game play.

Quote from the Plasma Pong website:

'Players have several new abilities that add fun twists to the classic game. In the game you can inject plasma fluid into the environment, create a vacuum from your paddle, and blast shockwaves into the playing area. All these abilities have fluid-based kinetic effects on the ball, making Plasma Pong a fast-paced and exciting game.'

See more screenshots here.

Create 'icns' icons from images

I was looking for a simple utility that allowed me to convert some png images to icns icons. I did some Googling and found img2icns, which is a tool made for that particular purpose.

img2icns screenshot.

Making your desktop dynamic

If you are not satisfied with your static desktop wallpaper you can use Wallsaver to spice up your desktop. Wallsaver makes it possible to run your favorite screensaver full-time on your Mac OS X desktop.

'Flurry' screensaver running...

Wallsaver looks quite nice but I turned it off after a while since the screensaver distracted me too much :)

Mouse gestures for Mac OS X

While I was trying out the new Safari 3 (Public Beta) browser, I really missed mouse gestures that I have been using in Firefox for a long time (and which I cannot do without!).

However, adding mouse gestures to Safari (and all other Mac applications) turned out to be quite simple. The shareware program xGestures makes it possible to define gestures for individual programs and map them to useful functions.

After defining various gestures (e.g. Back, Forward, New Tab, Close Tab), Safari became quite useful but I still prefer Firefox because of the massive amount of indispensable Add-ons available.

Goodbye Tumblr

Today I made the final transition from Tumblr to Blogger - moving my relatively new tumblerlog to this location. I liked the simplicity of Tumblr with the very Mac-like interface etc. but the simple design failed in the end (I needed a 'blog'). Two things I really missed with Tumblr was the option to add labels for my postings and a simple archive for browsing old postings. The only thing I miss on Bloogger is the option to have a few static webpages (currently solved by linking to other blogs on Blogger :)

I also replaced the header image since someone found it too obscene. The new one is made using NodeBox.

Testing regular expressions (II)

Since I wasn't able to find a suitable (and stable!) regular expression utility for Mac OS X - I decided to write one myself. It took me a few hours of programming (using C++ and Qt) and I'm very satisfied with the result so far :)

The program is called RegExplorer and it is based on the built-in QRegExp functionality provided with Qt. Basically, the user can type in his or hers favorite regular expression and the program will validate it and highlight matching patterns in a text sample. Previous expressions are stored and can be retrieved from the combobox and the number of matches found is shown in the status bar. The application will be available free of charge (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) when I have found a nice application icon :-)

RegExplorer

Testing regular expressions (I)

Today, I was looking for a simple utility that I could use for testing (and experimenting) with Regular Expressions. For Windows, Regulator is the obvious choice but for Mac OS X several small utilities exists. Here is a list of some of the hits reported by Google:

• Reggy 1.1
  
• RegexTester 1.0
  
• RegExpress 1.2
  
• RegExToolbox
  
• Regex Widget
  

Some of them should be considered work in progress. In some cases, closing 'about' or 'preference' dialogs also closed the main application :) From the list above I would recommend Regex Widget and Reggy although Reggy often crashed on my MacBook.

Reggy

RegExp Widget

MAME for Mac OS X

The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) makes it possible to revive the glorious moments from your childhood where you most certainly (if you can remember Commodore, Atari, and Amstrad) played on the video arcade games arranged in the back of the local 'grill bar'. For Windows I always used Mame32 and when I switched to a PowerBook and Mac OS X, I found MacMame to be a reasonable substitute for Mame32. Unfortunately, MacMame is not a Universal Binary, so I had to use something else when I switched to an Intel-based MacBook (I'm not too fond of Rosetta). Fortunately, MAME OS X - a native OS X port of MAME is being actively developed. Compared with MacMame, it is designed to take advantage of all the latest OS X technologies, such as Core Video and Core Image making rather useless visual effects (see below) possible. Overall the program works very well when not playing around with visual effects too much...

Playing 1942 with bloom, edges, and cube visual effects.

Context Free Art

Context Free is a program that makes it possible to edit and render Context Free Design Grammars (CFDG). In short, CFDG are sets of non-deterministic rules that are used to generate images. With only a few rules it is possible to make amazing art beyond imagination. Be warned - the program is very addictive!

See gallery for more CFDG examples.

For Python evangelists, NodeBox offers a more low-level programming approach than Context Free with the possibility to create very cool pictures.

Remember Fractint back in the MS DOS era? GNU XaoS has gone a step further with fractal generation and rendering. To summarize, GNU XaoS XaoS is an interactive fractal zoomer, which renders the fractal in real-time while the user explores the fractal universe by zooming in and out of user-selected areas of interest. The program is licensed under GPL and is available on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms.

GNU XaoS for Mac OS X.