Recent work on gnome-games has concentrated on making the mouse cursor give a decent hint about what you can do. It started with Paolo Borelli sending in a a patch for aisleriot to change the cursor when you clicked on a card. This patch mutated somewhat and now the cursor changing to a hand when you can grab a card (and then a closed hand if you actually do). After doing that, and while I could still remember the details of the GDK cursor API, I hurried over to Robots and used the cursor to provide hints for what happens when you use the mouse to control the little man. i.e. if clicking would move you right then it will be a right arrow. I was already fairly happy with the feel of the mouse support, but the visual hints make using it a no-brainer. All this will be appearing in the 2.7.4 release which should be tonight (hopefully, if Venus is in the right constellation, or something like that).
Work has finally showed signs of improving with one last tweak being enough to make the experiment work reliably (or at least as reliably as it always had). Yesterday marked the first time in nearly a month that I did something that could be described with the word “progress”.
It is Cushla’s birthday tomorrow. The pressie is all sorted out and I’m taking the day off to be with her. It will be a welcome break given that my recent weekends have been spent in the lab.
As a birthday present to myself I purchased a tropical fish tank. It’s been up and running three weeks now and is going very well. It’s only half stocked, but the plants are growing well and the fish are happy (haven’t lost any yet). I last kept tropical fish over ten years ago and this time around I’ve decided to do it properly. Unfortunately this means learning about the nasty details of water chemistry and being patient about introducing fish. It appears to be paying off though. I’ll post pictures once I’ve got some decent ones. My current photos are predominantly of blurred Tiger Barbs, the bastards just won’t keep still.