A long time ago I decided that I would never ever watch another movie directed by Roland Emmerich. Not every movie on my menu must be super quality, plain good entertainment is usually OK, and sometimes I even enjoy to see trash films. But I always felt insulted by the stuff made by Emmerich because he seems to assume that the viewers of his movies (e.g. me) are dumbasses that are happy to see explosions, and never mind the story. So these days Emmerich movies are a no-go for me.

A few days ago I saw Star Trek Into Darkness. After maybe half the movie had passed, I felt how I got angrier and angrier at all the stupid mistakes in the story, until in the end I had to say: What a dumb movie! Then I happened to see the writing credits, and everything became clear: Damon Lindelof has done it again. As a writer this guy just seems to be abysmal, and now he is getting reeeeally close to the brink of my Emmerich hole...

Little Go 0.11.0 has been published on the App Store on April 23 2013, almost 4 weeks ago. For some reason I completely forgot to write this announcement, and I also forgot to update the master and develop branches on GitHub. I just fixed this a few minutes ago...

For iPhone users this new release finally brings the long-awaited zooming feature, making it much easier to place stones on large boards. iPad users can also zoom, but this is of much less value, except maybe for the iPad Mini. It is now also possible to display move numbers and coordinate labels, things I originally planned to implement much sooner, but somehow there was always stuff to code that seemed to be more important. So in the end I am not sure how important these two features really are, but they are at least a nice graphical addition to the UI.

Something of which I am sure that it is very useful is the new ability to export and import .sgf files to/from other apps such as Mail or DropBox. Working on these features prompted me to propose this draft of a UTI specification for the .sgf file format, but so far the announcement on the sgf-std mailing list has not received any responses. Ah well, it's probably not the most important thing in the world ☺.

The project page for Little Go has moved to https://littlego.herzbube.ch/. The new site is hosted by GitHub Pages, accordingly the site source files can be found in this gh-pages branch. The only resources for the Little Go project that are still on my private server are the third-party software tar balls required to build Little Go.

As of this morning, a new version of Little Go (v0.10.0) is available in the App Store.

A lot of work has gone into this feature release: Almost three months, much more time than I had originally anticipated. The biggest chunk was spent on adding the function for viewing board positions for moves played earlier during the game. The main problem I had here was designing the user interface: On the iPhone I had to add UI elements to an already crowded screen, and on the iPad I gave myself the challenge of revamping the entire "Play" tab.

Another thing that kept me busy were the graphic design changes: Adding artwork for the Go stones, and adding a wooden background to the Go board. With these changes the app suddenly looks much more attractive, which I find very satisfying because usually I am such a nil when it comes to polishing up a purely-functional UI.

No single release in the history of the project has more changes than v0.10.0, both visible to the end user and technically under the hood. On the one hand this is good because it tells me that the code is still malleable, on the other hand I am a bit nervous because many changes usually also means many new bugs. Let's hope that it doesn't get too bad.

This is the workflow Apple envisioned when they introduced the annoying quarantine flag back in the days of Mac OS X 10.4:

1. User A downloads an archive (.dmg, .tar.gz, etc.) from the Internet. The system applies the quarantine flag to the archive file.
2. User A extracts an application from the archive and places it into /Applications. The system infects the app bundle passes the quarantine flag on to the app bundle.
3. User A launches the application. The system warns about the unsafe origin of the app.
4. User A confirms that the app is safe to use. The system clears the quarantine flag. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, my workflow is slightly different: Click the "Read more" link to see what the problem is.

python-aprmd5 0.2.1 has no functional changes, it just includes a patch for a more comfortable build without having to manually edit setup.py. The patch was contributed by Juan A. Diaz - thanks Juan! I took this opportunity to move the project to GitHub. A small project page stub remains here on herzbube.ch that lets me host the source distribution tar balls for each release.

If you like a bit of computer science entertainment, this StackOverflow question has a humorous treatment of a very real world problem that I am sure has affected all of us, more or less severely.

And here is a demonstration how a light-hearted subject will always be turned into a controversy by people that are just too focused. What a pity.

The newest bugfix release 0.9.2 for Little Go has finally been released on the App Store last night. It took a bit longer than originally expected because I didn't manage to submit the binary before Apple closed their iTunes Connect service for the Christmas holiday.

0.9.2 addresses a number of crashing and memory leak issues which should help to further increase stability. As good as this sounds, I am not yet done with bugfixing because I have received reports for a new type of crash. Also I have become aware of a few changes in iOS 6 that make it necessary to revise the strategy for releasing memory when the app receives a memory warning. I don't know yet if I am going to roll these things out in another bugfix release (0.9.3), or if I will incorporate them into the next feature release. The decision largely depends on the feedback I get for 0.9.2.

The bugfix release 0.9.1 has just gone live on the App Store this morning. It fixes another glitch in the Ko detection routine (the same function I already muddled with for 0.8.1). Get the newest sources from GitHub.

Unfortunately 0.9.2 is already in the works: The new crash reporting feature in 0.9.0 has led to over 80 crashes being reported in only a few days. As sad as it is to see that the app I am sweating over is not as perfect as I would have liked it to be, it is still a good thing to see those bugs finally coming out into the open so that I can squash them. It also proves that adding both a crash reporting and a general in-app bug reporting feature in 0.9.0 was well worth the effort. If I ever start another iOS app project I will certainly launch the app with both of these QA features already in place.

The bugtracker for Little Go has now moved to GitHub. From now on everybody who has a GitHub account will be able to submit new issues without emailing me first. The few tickets that are still open on the old tracker will be duplicated on GitHub and closed on the old tracker.