Code Tennis: Volley 2?

Ok, so Pete got back to me with his volley, albeit incomplete.

For never touching Objective-C or Cocoa in his life, he took on a rather ambitious volley: turning my simple “speaking magic eight ball” into a speaking RSS feed reader.

He found Apple’s Publication Subscription framework, and went to town trying to get it to work. I took a quick look at the code, and it seems I’ll have to do some reading in the documentation before I can fix it.

Hopefully this doesn’t spell the end for our Code Tennis match..

Check out the code on github.

Playing Code Tennis – First Volley!

A few days ago I came up with an idea for collaborative/competitive programming after seeing a match of Layer Tennis.

I’m sure you can see where this is going… yes, Code Tennis!  A quick google showed me that some other people had this idea before me, and setup a nice looking website, although no one is using it.

Code Tennis has some cool features: Twitter notification of volleys, bitchin’ graphics, and a timeline of commits/volleys.  I just hope that it all works as expected since it doesn’t look like the creators have had any external testing yet.

I’m playing my friend Pete (his site). So far the only ground rule is that the app has to be a Mac desktop app (NOT document based) written in Objective-C.

First Volley before click
First Volley before click

My first volley (above) is a Magic 8 Ball that uses the OS X speech synthesizer to “say” the 8-Ball’s response.  I can’t wait to see what Pete does with it!

First volley after click
First volley after click

Updated SPE package for Mac OS X

I haven’t written a ton of python. and what I have isn’t very pythonic.

An IDE that really helped me out when I did write said python was Stani’s Python Editor (SPE).  It has a host of useful features including (but not limited to) debugging, UML, GUI creation, and Blender support.

Without modification, SPE is simply a .py to be executed, which can be a bit cumbersome on OS X where you may be used to launching apps via the dock or spotlight/quicksilver.

Over on Stani’s blog, Krzysztof Olczyk posted an OS X packaged version of SPE.

I have simply updated the version to reflect the latest as of this post, which is 0.8.4.h

If there are issues, check the forums over at Berlios, or contact me.

You can snag it here.