Starting The Engines For 2012

Well it has been a fairly productive few days for me. Coming of the back of a cold I seem to have regain my coding mojo. Ideas are gestating in my head.

But first things first. A return to CoffeeScript meant I needed to update my dev environment. As I seriously doubt I will be producing any thing that is more than a few thousand lines of code per game/app I don't really need to invest much time in the build environment. So I am just using the CoffeeScript compiler in the watch mode.

I toyed with the idea of using the WebStorm IDE from JetBrains as my main editor. I download and played with a copy for a while and CoffeeScript support has really improved over the last year. Though January they have a discount on it so it is pretty cheap. In the end I decided to devote a few hours to my gVim set up as my needs are pretty simple. I installed vim-snippets which made coding more fun. CoffeeTags and TabBar to make navigation more fun. The end set up is light weight, fun to use and there is not waiting around for anything. Yes I am getting a little obsessed with not waiting for anything.

Incidentally if you are on windows and find that vim-snippets is not working for you it may be your pathogen script is out of date, assuming you installed it that way. vim-snippets did not work until I updated my pathogen script. The are a number of people that seem to have problems getting vim-snippets to work.

While we are on the subject it looks like CoffeeTags may not work with the latest version of ruby on windows, The author is looking at this I think and the version of ruby I have installed is 1.87.

So I know have a nice dev environment for CoffeeScript except it is on a window machine that I was experimenting with and I know need to reproduce the same set up on my main linux dev machine. That should not take too long.

While doing this I have also finished off my first little game of the year. Something to get into the swing of things that is a very small game about making squares disappear. Depending on many factors it should hit my website in a few days. One of my sons has a suspected case of pneumonia so things are a bit up in the air at the moment.

I took a look at the website and found it needs a bit of an overhaul. There is some complicate build script that I am sure I was proud of when I wrote it. I will be deleting that and returning to something quite simple instead. The number of content pages is small and the game pages tend to be quite empty. Just the game, some google ads, a link to my main site and the required privacy link. Just not worth the complexity of having build scripts. This it the next thing on the list of things to sort out as a precursor to publish the little game I have written.

Finally I spend a couple of hours coding and putting out an update for my DaysUntil app on android. It had been a while since doing android stuff and it was a fun and quite easy thing to add. I did get annoyed with eclipse hanging on me a number of times. Out of interest I took a look at JQueryMobile to see if the page transition issue had been sorted out or fixed in the latest version of android/JQueryMobile. It appears not and the developers are still trying to figure out the best way to go forward.

So while I have a number of prototypes for android app I won't be spending any time on them just yet.

Err sorry about this being a bit of a rambling post but compared to the end of last year I seem to be quite productive.