February 2023 monthly update

written on Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Introduction

Welcome to this new monthly update!

This month I worked on the usual projects: Pixel Wheels and Clyde but also on Nanonote and an old one: Cat Avatar Generator. Let's get started.

Pixel Wheels

As announced in January update, Pixel Wheels 0.24.2 has been released, adding 3 new translations (Hungarian, Esperanto and Turkish) and fixing 2 bugs:

• The display would sometimes stutter during races.
• In championships, the player rank could sometimes be wrong in the 2nd or 3rd race.

Since then, I fixed another bug which occurred while editing configuration keys (#326). I also included another translation, this time it's Italian, thanks to Dario Canossi 🇮🇹!

NPong

I continued working on my NPong proof-of-concept network game. I added Android support, host discovery and introduced Box2D, making the game closer to Pixel Wheels. This might actually work 🤞!

Cat Avatar Generator

Cat Avatar Generator is a small Android app I built a long time ago to... generate cat avatars (how surprising!) based on David Revoy excellent Cat Avatar Generator.

It had not been updated for a few years, and Google warned me it would be removed from Google Play if it did not receive a new update, so... I did update it.

The internals have been modernized a bit and the dependencies updated:

• Gradle: 2.14.1 → 7.5.1
• AGP: 2.2.3 → 7.4.1
• SDK: 23 → 33

I also made the launcher icon adaptive, giving the app a more modern look, then released 0.2.1.

Nanonote

Thanks to Daniel Laidig, Nanonote now has support for Markdown-style tasks in lists!

When creating a list entry with - [ ], the next entry automatically starts with the same text checkbox. Ticking and un-ticking the box can be done with either Ctrl+Enter anywhere in the line of the entry or with Ctrl+Left click on the checkbox.

On my side, I worked on making sure standard actions like Copy or Paste are translated, on all OSes.

Now it only needs a new release!

Clyde

A bunch of nice-to-have changes landed in Clyde this month:

• Clyde now tries 3 times to download assets before giving up. This makes it cope better with unreliable hosts.
• clydetools fetch now recognizes aarch_64 in asset filenames as ARM 64bit architecture. This fixes fetching updates for Envoy.
• I reworked the file cache to avoid "corrupted assets" error messages when downloading assets whose names do not include version numbers (looking at you, Difftastic!).
• clyde setup now makes a shallow clone of the store repository, reducing bandwidth usage.
• The URL for Clyde store can now be defined with clyde setup --url STORE_URL

Clyde Store

Only one new entry this month: dive.

What's coming next?

In March, I am going to:

• continue working on NPong;
• release a new version of Nanonote;
• if all goes well, release a new version of Clyde.