This past summers participation in Googles Summer of Code has really revitalized the K-3D project to some degree. Especially with the realization that we1 need both more regular users as well as developers, to keep interest in the project alive and as a reason to continue development.
One of the suggestions was to create demos of K-3D as screeencasts. In my own experience a screencast tell me more about an application and the work flow than a screenshot or tutorial ever will. Over the previous week-end Joe Crawford2 really applied himself to the task and spent ten hours making this quite impressive introduction to K-3D.
My apologies for the poor quality. Google Video resized and transcoded the hell out of it while Joe’s original TechSmith video is razor sharp.
1 I haven’t contributed to the projects for years, but will again once I get my new workstation.
2Joe Crawford teaches 3D at VanArts in addition to running his own studio and serves as “superuser”-consult to the project.
I’ve just released PyFTGL which makes it possible to take advantage of FreeType and FTGL to render text in OpenGL program using TrueType, Type 1 or OpenType fonts. PyFTGL wraps the functionality of FTGL into a Python module so it can be used in conjunction with PyOpenGL.
Note that the bindings are still in alpha: they will work if you use them correctly, it’s just the error checking that’s currently missing.
During the weekend I decided to hack together my own last.fm radio player in Python. I had found the My Playlist station pretty useless after being treated to the same three songs over and over again, and set out to code a player that would autoskip any songs I’ve already listened to once during a “session”.
So I combed the web and the official developer forum for useful information and even ended up digging into the official desktop client source code to find the answers to my questions. All information needed to implement a client (bar already officially documented components) have now been compiled into one spec-like entry in my last.fm journal.
Not many new posts have showed up here in a while due to the fact that a) I have nothing web or code worthy to say and b) I have been busy getting my native Swedish blog going.
But don’t despair. During my summer break this year I’ve started to code a new application in Python that I’m hellbent on completing and releasing. In the process I’m thinking about writing up some brief pythonic posts on topics I usually revisit (or relearn) every time I get back to code in Python. On the joy of Python.
