Fork and Beard - Applications and Games

Glug Glug

It's Glug Glug. Just two fish and a lobster. Written in VBA for Excel. The fish swim about just like the real thing and the lobster just crawls about slowly, as I imagine does, the real thing.

One of the first things I actually got to a finished(ish) state. MWC 2006. Glug Glug

Whitenoir

I often find myself tinkering with images in ms paint (pre Windows 7 - that is) trying to create good bitmaps from scanned images or photos. Ultimately I want to be able to open a basic paint package and by using the fill tool change the colour scheme of an entire image in just a few clicks.

To create the fork and beard logo, for example, I had drawn, what I thought, was a good render of a fork and a beard with a meaty marker pen on some scrap paper. I liked the shapes but couldn't really use them in the website because although I'd used a black marker pen the image just wasn't sharp enough once scanned in. When I zoomed in there was ton upon ton of grey pixels so when I tried to fill the image I was left with reams of turd ridden gaps. To get round this I started manually changing the pixels. One pixel at a time. NNNNnnnnooooooo! but I wasn't disciplined enough to A) do the entire image and B) to keep consistency between pixels. BOooooo.

So I knocked up a spivvy application to iterate over every single pixel in an image and change it to either black or white. Wasn't hard at all in .NET and the results gave me a right good tingle in my bottom. Err ou er ou er ou.

The app was deadly simply with no real UI to speak of and to point it to an image I had to change a hard coded value in the source and then run the app. Very poor.

My bootiful girlfriend is often wrangling with images on and off the computer so on occasions I had run some of her artwork through the application to create solid bitmaps. Girlfriend liked it but wasn't it a shame only I could actually use it. I had no inclination, what so ever, to create a releasable version of the app - when I first knocked it up - but because I suffer from a chronic developer condition - I never finish anything - I thought it would be a nice candidate for my first finished product. So I did it. She done me good.

I found some awesome free icons from iconfactory which pretty much made the UI design a yummy piece of piss. The logo was created in Excel 2007 using its support for formatting shapes with text.

I kept it in .NET and not Java just because I can create an app about ten times quicker in .NET especially where UI is concerned. I love swing, don't get me wrong, but win forms is just more simple and the bottom line is I have never once, in Visual Studio, thought oh dear, I can't create the UI I want. Never. And I've churned out boat loads of Window's forms.

There was no real issues but I am rather pleased with my custom slide control, even though the results on the images are still a mystery until you actually click the go button I think it's the best UI solution and you err can't beat a bit o' trial and error. I was also pleased with being able to watch the image go through the transformation. Always nice to see something in progress. It was achieved by some yummy threading. Multi-threading, yum. Custom controls, yum. Yum + yum = yumyum. MWC 2009 Whitenoir

Clipboard Launcher

One of the first things I do when I'm working on a new PC is to create a simple application which attempts to start a process using the text in the clipboard. It's never more than a few lines of code and I have it sitting in the quick launch for easy access.

I use it all the time, especially when I've kicked off a build in Visi Studio and I want to browse to the output directory. I just copy the path from the output window and then click my Clipboard Launcher app and hey presto I'm looking at the .exe.

It's also dead useful if there's a URL or a file path in a database, or an XML string in code etc... Just click the Clipboard Launcher app and the clipboard gets launched.

So, I thought I'd make a suped up, Clipboard Manger-esque, version of it so I don't have to keep re-creating it. Here it is. Clipboard Launcher

Panchromatic

So I got an email from a Whitenoir user. I never get random emails so this was a real thrill. It read something along the lines: Your wonderful Whitenoir application would have been better named Panchromatic. And this was all the message said...

So I Googled panchromatic - standard - and discovered it describes a type of monochrome film. Wobsta observation then. I should have called it Panchromatic but it was too late to rename it. I'd already submitted it to hundreds of software websites. BOOoooo! So it got me to thinking. I should create a new application and call this one Panchromatic. Sur-weeeeeet. All good ideas start with a name. Well it works for Karl Pilkington's.

It would still have to revolve around two colours, this went without saying, so I began thinking about the way Whitenoir works - iterating over every pixel in a row, row by stinking row - and I thought hmmmmmm I should go to bed - not really. I was already in bed. No no no, I thought hmmmmmm I could create a dark pixel where two different colours meet to create a rather stonking, outline only-a-go-go, image.

Simple pimple. Fired up the Whitenoir source and made the changes firstly, and mostly, cosmetic - went for blue - and then hacked the code to make it a two stage process. Stage one: turn the image into an image which uses only a handful of colours. Stage two: create a line between each colour change. Turned out to be a bit of a head funk; re-factoring the main piece of code nearly killed me. I have absolutely no doubt it would have been quicker to start again. Or even quicker to have hacked the code whilst not listening to old XFM broadcasts but this I did not do. I guess mostly because I'm a cun- you can't say that -t and will always prefer to hack some working code rather than start from scratch for a rinky dinky utility app.

No matter though. Quite happy with the app. Decided to make it less configurable than Whitenoir. Panchromatic has just three modes with an option to change the outline size. Each mode reduces the original image to a specific colour palette resulting in either less or more detail/outlines. Two stages makes it a bit slower than Whitenoir but I have thought of a much quicker way of doings things - which I'll implement should I get more than five downloads... MWC 2009. Panchromatic

Conway Life

Someone over at stackoverflow.com click here for link wanted to know how to make Conway's the Game of life in Excel using VBA and macros. So I though I'd do it. Here it is.

Just select a cell in the white area to make it a live cell then click the Go button when you're happy.

You'll also note there's a code in the blue box for each life's generation. You can copy this code if you like a pattern and simply lamp it back in and click Load if you want to see it again. MWC 2009. Conway Life

Vat Plough

Recently, at work, I've been tasked with reconciling some purchase orders and purchase receipts. It's been made a might tricky because we have two different VAT rates to consider. VAT, Gross, 15%, NET, VAT, 17.5%, Gross, NET, VAT HATE IT! So to quickly rule out mistakes in VAT I've created this little VAT Calculator application. It gives you all the VAT, NET, Gross and Gross VAT for any amount on both 15% and 17.5% rates.

It also lets you click a resulting VAT calculation to look at the various values for that amount. Just in case the VAT has been added/subtracted multiple times. It also includes a back button to show you previous amounts. That's the VAT Plough. Ploughing VAT and spitting out answers for you and your friends. MWC 2010. Vat Plough