Croggle

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• Version 1.1 released

  11 May 2014

  Hello Crogglers!

  We haven't written for the last few days, but that's only because there was so much exciting development being done! We have released version 1.1 of Croggle, which is the first major update since the ending of the PSE project. New in this release is the following:

  • Exchanged most of the alligator and egg graphics with new ones, courtesy of Iris
  • Added some gimp files to the repository for better ability to modify
  • Added new effects to be used in animations: Shader based recoloring and rotations
  • Drastic improvements to animations. Now you can see step-by-step what's going on
  • Merging previously mentioned improvements, namely FroYo support on Android and revised operations on the model

  We also created new releases with binaries on github for android and desktop. The android version is even signed! Unfortunately, this can mean that you have to uninstall your previous installation before upgrading, since the signatures are different :(

  The new version became ready just in time to participate in this year's appartawards by ZKM here in Karlsruhe. The registration form did not respond, though, and so we hope that our submission via email will be accepted. We will keep you up to date on any developments in that direction.

  Exciting times lie ahead of us! Thank you for reading :)

• Today's updates

  04 May 2014

  Hello fellows :)

  We only posted a news overview yesterday, we know. But as there are so many little things that are being done at the moment which are still significant enough to be mentioned each, we simply have to keep track of them here.

  First thing that happened in the mean time is that we fixed our blog css, so it won't destroy the usability as it did before. It's still not beautiful, but being able to use the blog without cramping has its benefits.

  Another story to mention is that we just fixed the associativity issue in connection with eating/ beta reduction. As this was the last thing that differed from "real" lambda-calculus, we are now proud to say that we have the perfect adaption of the calculus for learning. This is also a great thing to tell our tutors at the institute that we developed croggle for, since they originally discovered the problem during our product inspection. Currently the changes are still in the revised-visitors branch, but there is nothing speaking against a timely merger into the master branch at the moment.

  Last but not least, we would like to announce that we disabled the wiki and issue tracker functionalities for most of our repos. They had been enabled as part of the standard setup process, but especilly having three different bug trackers for what is essentially just croggle-base was just overkill. If you want to open an issue, feel free to head over to the remaining bugtracker at croggle-base.

  We also think that we haven't covered it here before, but we also wanted to point out that croggle-android was made compatible with android api level 8 (FroYo). The changes are living in an own branch, too, but they have made it into the release that can be downloaded as version 1.0 from the repository. So if you are still on 2.x, make sure to check it out!

  Thank you for your interest in croggle and see you soon!

• Current development

  03 May 2014

  Hey folks!
  Just wanted to give you a quick update on what's going on atm.

  First, there is Iris working on new alligators.
  This will hopefully make us independent from Bret Victor's original drawings. We are actually considering this to be the most important step before we can go any further in publishing the app.

  Secondly, I (Lukas) am currently digging into the code again.
  Although most of the original team are considering the project completed there is still room for improvements. An example would be the tests that were failing which I fixed the day before yesterday. Additionally, I started to overhaul the traversion strategies of the tree operations. I think I could reuse parts of the current code for some other project I want to work on if I find the time soon. In my opinion, the division of data (model), traversion strategy and operation as we have it now is quite exceptional and I am still kinda proud of it.
  Last thing to mention is that I just hacked some code to enable the AgedAlligatorActors to be rotated. LibGdx made this easy again, after having found the correct place where to tell it to do the rotating. I had started to do this before in the old repository, but there I was following a completely different approach, causing me to write tons of useless and buggy code for it. If you want to compare: old vs new
  You have to ignore the stuff I did in other files than AgedAlligatorActor.java

  Oh! And I almost forgot!
  This week we added @Prgfx to our team. He was offering to do some html/css for this blog if he can spare the time. And even if not, it's still cool to have him in our GitHub organization :P

• Updated GitHub releases - with downloads!

  29 Apr 2014

  We just added/updated the release tags in our GitHub repositories for croggle-android and croggle-desktop. This time, we included downloadable binaries, so from now on we have a decent binaries hosting. Previously, they were stored in Lukas' dropbox :D
  If you are interested, head over to the android and desktop releases. We would also appreciate your feedback, so feel free to post in our issue tracker

  Maybe we will add some new features if we find the time, to be able to show something on our KIT day of computer science talk. So stay tuned!

• Croggle resubmitted to libGdx gallery

  28 Apr 2014

  After the magical disappearance of the first entry, we went ahead and just resubmitted our game to the libGdx game gallery. The showcase is currently the only one featuring prebuilt binaries downloads, although we don't intend it to remain that way. The text is pretty much stupid advertisement buzzwords concatenated, but it may be useful for some folks while we prepare this blog/website.

  You can find the gallery entry here