jujusoft blog

The Jujuscript interpreter + sample scripts are now available for download (including a jujuscript version of Drivey)

click here to download zip file

Please don’t ask me how it works, I haven’t the time to provide support— just try the sample scripts and go from there. I created Jujuscript more than five years ago, and have done sod all with it since besides Drivey and a few little test apps. The language is like a cross between C++ and Javascript, and maybe someone will get a kick out of it. If there is enough interest, I may be persuaded to document the thing and provide a better IDE/debugger/optimizer for it.

BTW sorry for disabling comments here… I was getting too much spam and haven’t had time to upgrade to same software as my main blog.

Which is of course just 1.43b with the expiry date removed :)

New version is not ready yet, mainly because I realized quite late that my unicode support doesn’t extend to filenames, so I’ve had some bugs coming in where files with non-ascii characters in their names can’t be opened/saved.

http://www.jujusoft.com/jujuedit

[cross-posted to intepid.com]

For a possibly limited time only [depending on how many complaints I get about it being confusing ;)] you can download the latest test version of Jujusketch:

> Download Jujusketch <

NOTE: that it requires WINTAB[32].DLL to be installed— ie you must already have a graphics tablet. Also it has been tested with only two type of tablet so far, Wacom and Genius, and already there are observable differences— tablet drivers seem to date back to the dark ages of Windows :( If anyone knows of another API I should be using please let me know.

Keyboard shortcuts:

P: Toggle pressure sensitivity
S: lasso select mode
D: draw mode
Ctrl+C: copy all or selected (should place meta data on clipboard which can paste into office etc)
Space: toggle stroke or fill mode
W/K: Set color to White/Black
R/G/B: Mix color to Red/Green or Blue
Ctrl + pen: Pan
Shift + pen: Zoom/Rotate
Backspace: delete last shape.
Ctrl+Z/Y: Undo/Redo
Alt-PgDown/PgUp: Move to next/previous picture in sketchbook folder
etc…lots of temp/test stuff in there… if you end up in some weird mode just close and restart :)

You just run the executable (there is no install process and it should be happy to run from any location). It will create a Sketchbook folder in My Documents where it will automatically save your drawings.

Recently I decided to make the move to VisualC++7.1 (aka .Net 2003), from the rather long-in-the-tooth version 6.0 which has seen me through the last eight years or so. I was kind of glad to see that Microsoft offered fewer packages than they used to; I assumed it would make my decision easier. In fact they now appear to offer only one standalone VisualC++ package, the "Standard" edition. If you want "Professional", you have to buy the whole Visual Studio package, which costs *shitloads* more.

Now since I don’t want C#, J#, ASP, Visual Basic, etc, I figure the Standard package is the obvious choice. And even though the feature comparison chart does indicate that the standard edition doesn’t use the "powerful optimizing compiler", I assumed that it simply meant I couldn’t tweak and tune my settings. After all, it’s the only C++ standalone product they are offering— surely it wouldn’t generate unoptimized code!

I was of course, being stupidly naive in my assumption [not a rare occurrence]. Microsoft have actually seen fit to only offer one standalone version of VisualC++, which creates program files more than twice the size and about 30% slower than the old one did. When built using VC7.1, jujuedit balloons from 480K to 1.05M, and runs significantly slower as well!

This could have been the end of the story, and I might have gone to bed very cross about this bullshit crippleware tactic, had I not done a search and discovered the Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. Amongst other things, this free toolkit from Microsoft includes:

Microsoft C/C++ Optimizing Compiler and Linker. These are the same compiler and linker that ship with Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional!

That would be the same compiler they left out of my "Standard" package! And now they’re just giving it away!

I downloaded and install the toolkit, and sure enough, there’s cl.exe along with a few companion dlls. I copied them over the smaller, crappier ones in my VC standard install and voila! I can build an optimized application, just like a real programmer. It’s still a bit of a pain, in that the IDE still doesn’t believe that optimization is available so you have to manually add the switches, but adding "/O1" to the project settings is not such a huge chore.

Read here and here for more details about the toolkit and how it can be used…

Have been getting a few requests for the new bookreader, and since it’s not ready to post yet, I thought I should probably de-expire the old one so that people at least have something to play with.

If you already have the old one installed, but it is not letting you use it, replace the file Reader.exe (usually found at "C:\Program Files\Jujusoft\Reader") with the following version:

Reader.exe

And if you’ve never installed it and want to try it, even though it’s an older version, then run the original installer first:

jujuread_0.98b.exe

Which will install the old expired version. You will then need to replace the executable, as described above. Sorry I can’t just build a new installer at this point— The 3rd party tools I used to create the old one have also expired!

Well!

A whole bunch of new people hit jujusoft, drivey and intepid after the slashdotting this last week, so I’m getting a bunch more feedback than usual. Even about things I’d nearly forgotten existed, like JujuTool ;)

JujuEdit— Since no one has busted 1.43 yet, I figure it’s stable enough to become the main release, and have linked it on the main page. (this is a free beta, so I hope people will understand the small amount of risk involved with trying this software).

BookReader— it’s just sort of 90% of the way to full UTF-8 support, so I just need to convert a few more functions to be able to post new versions of that. Needs a new name.

eLibrary— not sure when I’ll get a new version up. I am committed to using the new XML based index for that [rather than the hideous old human edited text index], so a fair amount of recoding is necessary to get a new version up. We’ll see. Needs a new name too.

Is now available for testing. This minor release fixes performance issue with large files becoming slow to navigate and edit.

jujuedit-1.43b.exe

The problem was that an internal cache designed to greatly accelerate such operations was not actually being refreshed when needed.

I’ve updated the main JujuEdit page, so anyone being sent there by the old version can pick up the new one. This seems like a pretty stable release, but feel free to break it and tell me how you did it :)

I’d like to get into a pattern of more frequent updates, since the annual release method just means I just leave it all until the last month anyway and then freak out when I realize I’m not ready.

I also need some kind of simple bug/feature tracking system for my software, since I currently have none. Does anyone have any suggestions for something incredibly simple and free for handling this kind of thing…?

I haven’t linked it on the main page yet, but anyone who might like to have a go at the new version can download it here:

jujuedit_141b.exe

There are a bunch of fixes/tweaks from previous version [listed on the development page]. I’ve been using this new version for a while, and am unaware of any critical bugs.

If you encounter any problems with the installation or the application itself, please let me know!

To current users who have been patiently waiting for an update, I am sorry I have been so utterly disorganized with these releases.

Although I didn’t find the time to update the syntax configurations, I did add an "Import…" function so that you will be able to more easily add them in the near future [eg I can provide individual XML syntax files for download].

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NOTE: If you already have JujuEdit installed, running this installer will do an uninstall first [after asking you] then you will have to run it a second time to actually install the new version. This seems rather fiddly to me, but the new install package does things that way by default, so I guess that’s the way it is until I switch to a different one.

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UPDATE (July 11, 2005): Have fixed Win98 problem with typed characters not being interpreted correctly [thanks, Ashwin]