Dec 3, 2023
This bug I foisted on myself today was a real "things are not as they appear" puzzle.

bugfix: only check for settings menu when open

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Dec 2, 2023
I fixed several embarrassing bugs in Lua Carousel in the past week, including:

  • Buttons now flash to give you feedback that, e.g. the file was actually saved like you asked and you didn't fat-finger the wrong button.
  • Tapping didn't always move the cursor.
  • If you selected some text and hit 'clear', the app would crash.
  • Dragging on empty space above the settings menu selected text beneath.
  • Lots of jitteriness.

Please give it a try.

By way of apology please accept this screenshot of the tree L-system fractal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system#Example_2:_fractal_(binary)_tree) running within Lua Carousel

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Nov 27, 2023
I'd somehow never drawn a Hilbert curve before. Finally rectified this omission.


I released the hopefully final feature last night for my mobile-friendly REPL: file loading and saving.

From here on out I only want to work on UI polish and accessibility. Let's see how long it can stay running without incompatibilities that require upgrades.

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Nov 26, 2023
Achievement unlocked: I've built an app large enough that it crashes my programming environment that puts all the code on a spatial surface.

Or spread out enough, rather. It's not really about lines of code, just how much area the code occupies.

The problem: I do this snazzy initial animation (see video) that takes in the whole thing before zooming back in somewhere.

That animation works by drawing the whole surface to an in-memory canvas before transforming it. Turns out drawing to a canvas still uses the video card, and I don't have enough video RAM for a virtual "monitor" of this resolution.

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Nov 23, 2023
Lua Carousel: A lightweight programming environment for desktop and mobile devices

I just published this thing on itch.io.

source code

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Nov 22, 2023
This responsive layout for my toolbar is the Sultan of Jank.

Lots of progress today. Remaining issues:

  • That question of how many colors to permit customizing.
  • UI for loading/saving files.

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Nov 21, 2023

Screenshot of the Carousel Shell (see previous alt texts in this thread) containing sliders for font size and foreground/background colors.

Remaining issues with the toolbar:

  • Actually persisting settings across restart.
  • Still not responsive. But I have a plan for this.
  • Every color I use in the editor needs more sliders to customize :grimace: Right now there are 3 other colors: comments, scrollbars and those borders around the editor. Maybe I need a dropdown :grimace: Or just punt.

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Nov 19, 2023
Progress on a lightweight programming environment for both computers and mobile devices. Modifiable live while it runs (though not on mobile devices).

The seed design constraint here was to structurally prevent the pop-up keyboard on a touchscreen from ever blocking my typing. That led to a multi-line commandline editor in the top half, fixing the non-editable output buffer in the bottom half. Independent commands/scripts then expanded in the only other direction available: left/right.

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Nov 18, 2023
Finally starting to take on scrollbars.


  As shown in this screenshot, my recent projects all have this bullet under "Known issues":

  "No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard."

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Nov 16, 2023
Another satisfying session of visual debugging.

I created a little app for first-graders to practice addition. They seem to enjoy these sudoku-like puzzles, and we ran out of them in the workbook.

Generating gets a little subtle. I thought I was done, but the totals were >10. Trying to fix that generated invalid puzzles, and I had to ping-pong a bit between the two.

All through, it was nice to try out different straight-line solutions and animate them as I tested.

Detail of the code for this app as seen inside driver.love. Uncommenting the 'loiter()' lines slows things down while generating a new puzzle, so that I can keep up with what the computer is doing.

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