Monthly Archives: January 2014

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Omega Hymnal improvements

Since uploading Omega Hymnal to Github ten days ago, I’ve made numerous improvements.  It almost seems like it’s time to slap a version number on it and call it a release.  Here’s a rundown of the features and fixes:omegahymnal-ss-2014-1-22

  • The utility links (import/export/settings/etc) are all grouped under a “Tools” submenu
  • I removed the default DB file from the source, so if you happen to use the default settings I won’t clobber your database when you “git pull”.
  • Omega Hymnal can initialize a clean database if you don’t have one, or you can reinit your database if you want to start clean.
  • I fixed a lot of nuttiness in the auto-text-sizer on the song screen. It’s more consistent now.
  • I added the capability to manually insert pagebreaks in the lyrics using the [pagebreak] tag. This is an alternative to manually shuffling things between text boxes.

Not sure where to go next, hopefully I can convince some others to start using this and get some good ideas. I’d love to figure out a way that I can make lyrics + chord entry a lot easier and less geeky (the world apparently doesn’t share my love of markup languages), though my ideas so far either go beyond the limits of JS or just over-complicate the problem.

Introducing Omega Hymnal

I’d like to announce the availability of a new program that I’ve been writing, Omega Hymnal. Omega Hymnal is a lyrics display program for informal worship settings.

omegahymnal_ss_1.png omegahymnal_ss_2.png

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On programming, kids, and game development

As many parents of boys can tell you, the dream careers of “Fireman” and “Astronaut” have long since been supplanted by “Video game programmer” (and “Lego designer”, but that’s another article…). Pretty regularly I hear from other parents that their son has an aspiration to learn programming so that he can make video games, and my own boys are no exception. This isn’t an entirely bad thing.

Kids want to make games because they understand games, and for many of them games are the most compelling thing they do on a computer. It’s not a bad way to get started in computer programming; frankly, anything that motivates you to write code is a good way to get started in programming. If that thing is games, so be it; if it’s a loan amortization calculator, that works too. Far be it from me to discourage any aspiring programmer from coding whatever gets his or her brain ticking.

Even so, there are three morsels of food-for-thought that young people and their encouraging parents should chew on when a child sets his (or her) sights on a career in video game design.

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