Category Archives: Programming

Making explosions – a Greenfoot video demonstration

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Explosion

Many of you probably know that I am working on the Greenfoot project. The software itself is in public release and is very usable. What is lacking at the moment is documentation – good instruction that tells people how to do things.
Creating this documentation will be one of our main tasks over the coming year or so. This will take various forms – web pages, a book, work sheets, examples, videos…

I have decided to make a start with some videos. They will be slightly random in order, showing things which I happen to have on my mind. Over time, though, I hope to build up a collection that is somewhat ordered: starting with basic tasks, and moving on to more sophisticated things.

So, here is the first batch: it shows you how to make a nice-looking explosion in Greenfoot. The video tutorial is sliced into three parts, just to keep the file size manageable.

The Greenfoot Video Tutorials

Making Explosions, Part I (length: ~5 min, 11.6 MB)
Making Explosions, Part II (length: ~18.5 min, 57.9 MB)
Making Explosions, Part III (length: ~15 min, 52.2 MB)

These are all published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

You can also get the source code of the project developed in the video.

Have fun. And let me know if you turn this into an interesting Greenfoot scenario!

Every open system develops towards the unusable

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Kathy Sierra, on her excellent blog (which may have very sadly come to a close now, but that’s another long and sad story) has recently published a collection of her favourite graphics from the last few years.

Here is one that I really like:

Featuritis
(By Kathy Sierra, from http://headrush.typepad.com/,
shamelessly copied without permission – I hope she doesn’t mind!)

You should really look at the site yourself – there are many more great diagrams!

The Featuritis diagram above struck a nerve with me, since it’s something that’s been close to my heart for a long time. It is also related to what I think is one of the Natural Laws Of Software Development:

Every open system develops towards the unusable.

If you want to find out why I think that, read on.

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More about Greenfoot sound

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Asteroids-1

As the next Greenfoot release nears, and I mentioned sound support in my last post, there’s now a short demo video available. It shows smooth animation, and sound support in Greenfoot (in an “Asteroids” scenario).
Watch it here.

And come the next Greenfoot release, do it yourself!

And the best thing about it (or at least one of the best): this whole program is written with only about 280 lines of code (in Java)! Not too bad, I reckon.

I Object

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A change occurred recently in the discussion of introductory programming teaching: the procedural backlash.

Suddenly, respected and experienced teachers start claiming that teaching object orientation early is not only difficult, but impossible. Procedural programming once again is supposed to be the solution, with objects having to take a back seat.

This development is not only questionable and unfortunate, but wrong and dangerous.

Read the full article here.

What’s wrong with syntax colouring?

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Syntax colouring – the annotation of source code with different colours for keywords and other syntactic tokens – has become standard in just about all development environments. Yet, it often does not make sense.

I don’t mean to say that it does not make sense at all to use colour to annotate source code. On the contrary. What I am saying is that almost all syntax colouring systems colour the wrong things.

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