I have just made available the first public release (version 0.5.0) of the
ZBerry
interactive fiction application. This release works pretty well, but is definitely rough around the edges. I hope people get some amusement despite any bugs. More details about installation and usage can be found on the
ZBerry Documentation page
.
ZBerry Game Play
Please take this for what it is worth… a silly little hobby project of mine that may or may not continue. If you really like this, feel free to comment. If you find bugs, source code patches are welcome, but complaints are not. My hope is that is that it is worth more than its price
(FREE)
but given that I’m making nothing from this I hope that everyone can understand there is absolutely no support implied or available.
I have been told that the
replacement Macintosh BlackBerry PPPD
is no longer necessary for systems that have Snow Leopard installed. In fact, it sounds like installing the patched pppd version can actually cause issues on Snow Leopard systems.
If you have Snow Leopard on your system, please do not install the patched version of PPPD.
I will keep the replacement package available for those like myself that are still running Leopard on their systems. In addition, there is a
version built for Tiger
.
Just a quick post to validate that the latest Leopard update (10.5.8) overwrites the changed pppd provided by my
replacement package
. I’ve also verified that installing the
replacement package
on top of 10.5.8 works just fine.
In my
last post
, I was pretty negative about the available BlackBerry user interface controls. While that fact hasn’t changed, I didn’t want to leave the impression that the BlackBerry API’s provide nothing to developers. The API’s provide lots of interesting functions including the ability to extend menus within other applications. Take a look at the following from the default messaging application on a 4.5 device.
Before Facebook Installation
This shows the menu in this application before installing the Facebook application. After installation, you can see that the Facebook application has added a new menu item to this application.
After Facebook Installation
This is a pretty nice feature of the API. Although I don’t have actual code to show for this, my assumption is that this is provided by using:
API’s like this allow for incredible integration with the rest of the applications on the device, opening up many very interesting opportunities.
I continue to be impressed with the build quality and overall polish of the BlackBerry Bold as an end-user device… at least for basic functionality. While some may not like the way BlackBerry push email works, I find it to be pretty nice.
As a developer, I’m much more disappointed developing using the BlackBerry native API than I expected I would be when I started playing with my little ZBerry project. Marcus Watkins
offers excellent insight into the world of BlackBerry development
, which I won’t try to rehash here. The part that I find incredibly frustrating is the lack of decent reusable user interface controls. As Marcus details in his blog post, the provided UI functionality has the bland look and feel of the base operating system. Even more frustrating to me is how little flexibility there is even within the standard controls. For instance, I wanted to provide the user the ability to customize the font used in the text display. Using the standard functionality yields the following dialog.
Read more…
I’ve decided to dub this little hobby project
ZBerry
(BlackBerry Z-Machine Interpreter). I made some progress this weekend allowing stories to be selected from the file system via a new “library” view.
ZBerry Library Selection
I need to add some suspend/resume support before this thing becomes really very usable on a phone, but some progress anyway…
I was recently struggling to understand how to text alignment works with the BlackBerry Graphics drawText function. Having developed for MIDP on JavaME for a number of years, I found that the way the BlackBerry API works is a bit counter-intuitive until you understand how it works. I expected that this code would work, based on JavaME:
Read more…
I have long had a strange fascination with the old text adventure games aka
interactive fiction
. I remember hanging out with my buddy Gary when we were kids, working our way through various
Infocom
games. The stories were fun and the puzzles were always a good way to make you think.
A few years ago, I created a JavaME MIDP Z-Machine interpreter called
ZeeME
. This was an interesting little project at the time to learn my way around programming for these small devices, but actually using it was painful at best. Typing natural text using triple-tap just wasn’t enjoyable. With a QWERTY keyboard on my BlackBerry Bold, it seemed like this might be a good time to resurrect this project yet again.
I’ve made some progress in building this out, but there is still a very long way to go. Here’s a snapshot of the emulator running the game “Minizork”.
Watch here for more to come…
I recently did a bit of fighting with the Macintosh pppd daemon to fix problems with Bluetooth tethering of my BlackBerry Bold. Downloads, installation details and more information can be found in
BlackBerry Bold PPPD Replacement
.