Whew.

When last I did something pseudo-productive, I blathered about being stuck. Oh, woe is me, I don’t know what I wanna do. Whine, bitch, piss, moan.

Nuts to that.

A few weeks ago I pushed out a much-needed, pretty-rad update to Wall-o-Matic and kinda changed the name. Feedback from a trusted source basically said “you idiot, it’s not ‘wall of matic’, it’s ‘wallomatic’”. She was right about pretty much both parts. It added a boatload of new styles, though sadly I don’t remember how many. Oops.

It also made a couple of changes that I’m really proud of. The first was simple and straightforward - do the wallpaper rendering on a background thread, check to see if you’ve done any new requests, then return if you’re still at that point in line. It keeps the UI nice and snappy regardless of how much monkeying you’ve done with the sliders.

The other thing I did - probably a better change - was to add an easier to use gallery mode for picking which kind of wallpaper you want to make. The first one relied on a user being curious about all the options, and being aware of when they looped. It was a dumb, programmer solution. This one shows you big honkin’ pictures of what they’ll look like on a big, responsive scrolling list. It’s what I should’ve done the first time around, but there weren’t really enough of the things to warrant the effort. Adding more generators only made the problem worse over time, so I’m kind of a victim of my own enthusiasm, I guess.

As far as games are concerned, I’ve been working more on the shmup, now called Bullet Heck. It started because I wanted to be @madgarden when I grew up, but now it’s kinda something different? It’s also pretty embarrassing/mortifying that I started it in July 2013. I’m going to blame my cluelessness about action games, SpriteKit and a whole other host of problems for taking so long. It just wasn’t any fun to work on, and I really didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I’m a bit less clueless now, so I’m hopeful to get it done, uh, eventually? It’ll be done someday. There’s really not that much to do, but I’m anxious that it’s not really all that much fun to play. People seem to like it, though, so I’ve got that going for me.