Hey! I'm back!

For real this time! Ancient Greeks had a maxim that said "Γηράσκω δ' αιεί πολλά διδασκόμενος", which roughly translates to "Even as I grow older, I never stop learning new things". And I love the Ancient Greeks. And I had a lot of studying to do.

Because of my studies of a dragon sieging my house, I had pretty little time to work on SDLU, thus I didn't really invest much time on thinking about new features or fixing any bugs (not that there are any deal-breaking bugs, thankfully most of them have been fixed).

Come summer time, I finally got myself some free time, which I plan on using to improve SDLU, hoping that experience I've gathered by working on other projects will help me along the way.

First goals would be to reduce the bloat of the build system, which inevitably means that some things will have to go (i like premake, and i actively use it on other projects, but it's just not working out with SDLU). Furthermore, special care will be given to fixing small annoying issues when compiling SDLU applications.

Lastly, some new stuff was added recently (SDLU_FileDialogW()), and hopefully more will be on the way! Plus, I actually have a Mac machine to work on now, so Mac OS X will get much more love than the current hit-or-miss scripts.

I'll be adding issues in the bug tracker, which you are more than welcome to review and give your opinions or help out by improving my stupid code. Till next time!


-- Aggelos Kolaitis

That was kinda sad

So, it has been quite a while before I wrote here, hasn't it? The last few months I had to focus mainly on my studies, and that didn't allow me to spend time on SDLU.

Truth is, I missed it... It was a fun project, and even though it never became well-known, I loved working on it. Now that I have time to spend on SDLU again, I plan on just trying to keep it stable enough for users that either want to use it directly without problems, or just want to see how they can accomplish certain SDL tasks (e.g. writing basic GUI components, like buttons).

That's why I'll mostly focus on clearing the code and making it easier to read and understand. New features may be added, yet nothing is sure. Stability and readability is now my focus.

-- Aggelos Kolaitis

Added file dialog API [updated]

Ding ding ding!

I just added a new API (SDLU_FileDialog()), which fires up a file chooser dialog. See 'testfiledialog' for an example of its usage.

The back-ends supported so far are GTK+ (for UNIX and Mac OS X) and the Win32 API. Soon to be added is a native Mac OS X backend (using NSOpenPanel).

Just download the latest version from http://bitbucket.org/sdlu/sdlu/get/master.zip, compile and have fun! I have also uploaded snapshots at the downloads page at bitbucket.


-- Aggelos Kolaitis

Planning some "de-bloating"

Having finally finished my finals, I look into removing some bloat from the library. By "bloat", I refer to stuff that is of no real use, or stuff that can be simplified. Also, it is quite important to clean-up the source code, which is messed up in quite a few places, and remove some APIs that are not really needed anymore, e.g. the Framerate API, which is not needed since SDL got Vsync support.

-- Aggelos Kolaitis