Feb 20, 2024
rabbot.love

rabbot.love is a little helper I whipped up to check the programs the kids were writing for a neat little paper computer.

video; 25 seconds

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Nov 23, 2023
Lua Carousel

I finally decided to hang up a shingle on itch.io. My first app there is not a game. Lua Carousel is a lightweight environment for writing small, throwaway Lua and LÖVE programs. With many thanks to Mike Stein who helped me figure out how to get it working on iOS, this is my first truly cross-platform app, working on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

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Nov 16, 2023
sum-grid.love

A little sudoku-like app for helping first-graders practice addition. This attempt at situated software for schooling got a little more use than spell-cards.love.

video; 25 seconds

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Oct 18, 2023
crosstable.love

crosstable.love is a little app I whipped up for tracking standings during the Cricket World Cup, just to avoid the drudgery of resorting rows as new results come in.

video; 20 seconds

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Aug 22, 2023
Quickly make any LÖVE app programmable from within the app

It's a very common workflow. Type out a LÖVE app. Try running it. Get an error, go back to the source code.

How can we do this from within the LÖVE app? So there's nothing to install?

This is a story about a hundred lines of code that do it. I'm probably not the first to discover the trick, but I hadn't seen it before and it feels a bit magical.

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Jul 2, 2023
A simple app for drawing Wardley Maps

wardley.love is a reskin of snap.love for drawing Wardley Maps. I've been using it a lot; here's one example:

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Jun 28, 2023
pothi.love

I love reading Kragen Sitaker as an endless fount of surprisingly deep programs and analysis. Lately he's been avoiding the web and writing in a directory of markdown files. He writes so much that he switches directories every year or so (I think of them as volumes), and they're all highly recommended for sifting through during quiet afternoons:

pothi.love is a simple browser for such a directory of files that lets me add comments locally to them. Then I can git commit and git push to publish them.

(The name: 'pothi' is Sanskrit for a sort of loose-leaf book of palm leaves, 'bound' with a single string through a single hole in the middle of each page/leaf.)

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May 23, 2023
Using computers more freely and safely

A 15-minute manifesto (video and transcript) on lessons learned trying to build situated software for a year.

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Apr 21, 2023
snap.love

I've wanted something like this for a long time, a little app for drawing graphs. Intended for small graphs where laying things out by hand is not too painful, and it's nice that things don't move around every time I make a change, as happens with graphviz. The file format is still amenable to git like graphviz; no long lines, and adding new nodes or edges doesn't reorder unrelated nodes and edges.



  You see a single box on screen. Drag the border of the box. You see an edge stick out. Release the mouse button, and a new box (node) pops out at the other end of the edge.

  Drag the surface or press arrow keys to pan around.

  Drag the top-left bar for each box. They move relative to
  each other.

  Type within each box.

  Drag the parallel lines to the right of a box. The width of the box changes.

The catch: it's a lot more limited than all these tools; all you can do so far is draw rectangles and edges between them.

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Mar 11, 2023
spell-cards.love

An incomplete flashcard app for testing spelling. We thought the kids might need it but quickly invalidated that hypothesis. Still useful as a simple Freewheeling App that shows off LÖVE's audio recording and playback capabilities.

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