spinvaders 0.0.3

posted by jack at 19:24 CET in / compute / programming / spinvaders

Another two months, another handful of new changes.

(It's amazing how little spare time one can find to work on hobby projects during vacation and parental leave)

• Cleaned up event handling code; this should fix some bizarre hanging problems.
• Smoothed out the falling monster trail.
• Enhanced alien explosion clouds.
• Levels are now differentiated further. Earlier levels have fewer enemies.
• After every five levels you are given a level skip code.
• There are now "super aliens" which require two hits with the normal weapon (or one with the super gun) to kill them.
• High-score table!

And here's where to get it:

• spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)
• No windows build of spinvaders 0.0.3 is available at this time

Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like.

What you readin' for?

posted by jack at 14:14 CET in / politics

At the risk of turning this blog into an endless list of political essays you should read elsewhere, here are a couple more:

High plains grifter: The life and crimes of George W. Bush is sort of a Cliff's notes version of Molly Ivins' excellent Shrub for people who don't have time to read that. Incidentally, everyone who didn't already read Shrub years ago should really do so.

The Great Divide offers a new approach to dividing the American nation into two: Instead of republican vs. democrat, it's "metro vs. retro". I haven't read this yet, but it seems interesting, not least because in addition to being able to buy it from Amazon, you can also download the whole thing for free, which I heartily applaud.