Paris Graphics

Here’s something that is moving up my “to do” list for 2010.

To create (preferably working with others!) an Open Source VJ application for portable gaming consoles such as the gp2x, psp and dingoo.

Over the past few years, I’ve created a few apps that I use regularly on the gp2x and the gameboy advance. These apps either create abstract visuals mathematically, use sprites to create patterns, or occasionally… load some bitmaps and do strange things to them.

In the past year, I’ve seen a number of new people starting to VJ using game consoles. Cool! Most are looking for a more traditional VJ application. Something that can load short movie clips, blend them, etc. I think there is clearly a need for a good Open Source application for this purpose. In theory, one could be written which would work well on the gp2x, dingoo, psp and even… regular computers.

As far as I know the only application out there now that does this is pikix for the gp2x - note that the author has several other projects that are interesting on his site as well. pikix is a great app and I am not trying to create a “pikix killer” or anything of the sort. If you want to VJ with clips and have a gp2x, download it and have fun!

Oh.. I should also mention that the authors of the open source app freej mention that it could be ported to the gp2x - though I don’t know of anyone who has done that. I really like the freej engine and would be very interested to know about using freej as a library, or console ports, etc.

So why do I want to create another VJ application?
Well… a few reasons:

• I’d like to see one that is Open Source - allowing other developers to create effects and so on for it.
• I’d like all parts of content creation for it to be cross platform. For instance, with pikix the content that you create (a series of bitmaps or a quicktime movie) must first be compressed using the author’s Kouky application. Kouky only runs on Windows and uses .net framework. I’m sure there are good reasons why this path was chosen but personally, I avoid booting Windows. My OS of choice is GNU/Linux. Not to start an OS war but that’s really the only one that I care about - nevertheless - I would like any compression app to be crossplatform.
• I think it would be very possible for such an application to run on the gp2x, dingoo, and psp (again, also on most computer operating systems as well).

Very initial implementation thoughts:

• I am looking at coding this in C or C++. Yes ARM assembly is faster. Not only do I not know ARM assembly, but by keeping it in C or C++ it will be fairly straighforward to port.
• Drawing to the screen, handling input and all other good stuff like that will probably be done with SDL. I have used SDL successfully for gp2x development (in fact many apps do… including piggy tracker and pikix). As far as I know SDL libraries are available for the dingoo and psp. SDL also runs nicely on Linux, Mac, Windows and other OS’s.

Great! SO WHEN WILL IT BE READY?

I don’t know! To be perfectly honest, clips are fine and all but personally I know that I can do sets without them too - or if i want to animate a series of bitmaps, I can do it another way quite easily - but it’s something that would drive a new comer crazy (think sprite sheets). Also I have a pretty large “to do” list already.

SO WHY DID YOU POST THIS?

I posted this to see if there are others out who think this is a worthwhile project and who would be interested in collaborating. There is a much bigger chance of this becoming a reality if I have some collaborative help… oh and by collaborating I mean *coding* not just beta testing.

Interested? Let’s talk about it!

UPDATE Feb 02, 2010: Via a friend working on dingoo development… apparently the native OS (and official SDK) does not have SDL support and though dingux *does* have SDL support it does not have video out support at this time.

Lately I’ve been really loving WordPress as more than just blogging software.

Many people need a solution for collaborative website authoring - maybe a combination of static pages and blog posts. They want image galleries, music or video, and other functions and the good news is that WordPress can handle it quite well and still remain easy for people to use. In contrast, as powerful as it is, recent experiences showing non technical folks how to use Drupal (which I really like by the way) - showed me that it was too overwhelming for some users (no flames please - just my experience!).

Anyway… having decided to get a few users up and running with WordPress as a CMS, I decided to look into e-commerce solutions. Because WP is so popular I think we can expect to see more solutions in the future, but for now… there’s not much.

I decided to try out the plug in from from Instinct. This plug in comes in two flavors, free and Gold. I installed version 3.6 RC2 of the free version. At this point, I’m not sure if I will actually use this plug-in but in my limited testing it seemed to work fine. It’s fairly basic - definitely more basic then say OSCommerce but has the advantage that it’s already integrated into WP. In testing, I ran into one small issue which I will discuss here in case anyone else has the same problem and wants a fix.

Problem: I wanted to add JavaScript to the field holding additional product information:

The problem is that this field is processed so that it looks pretty and thus, code breaks.

Solution: I modified the file product_display_functions.php making one small change.

On about line 610 you will find

$output .= nl2br(stripslashes($product['additional_description'])) . “”;

The function nl2br converts newlines to HTML br tags - so we just remove that like so:

$output .= stripslashes($product['additional_description']) . “”;

and that was it.

I can now put JavasScript code into the Additional Description field.