Volity blog draft

Sneak preview of a blog entry I'll be making soon to volity.net, assuming I don't jinx the impending Gamut release by doing so. (There's an unmet dependency of my going to daerr's house and smacking his PC around before I can announce the new version on the website; sadly there's no other way right now to create a good Windows package.) Too lazy to add links right now, but there's the "state of the volity" i refer to: http://volity.net/blog/entry.html?id=111

This weekend's release of Gamut 0.4.1 - and the fact that we're into the second quarter of 2007 - leads me to more thoughts about a new direction I'd like to steer Volity in this year.

One improvement 0.4.1 brings is the inclusion of version 1.7b of Batik, the SVG library that Volity's used since the beginning. Starting with this version, Batik supports SMIL, SVG's native animation standard. I felt this was exciting enough to warrant an immediate library upgrade in what's otherwise a bugfix release of Gamut.

However, when I sat down to start playing around with this new animation power, my interest waned. As recently as a few months ago I would have dived right into experimentation with gusto (probably applying it to a card-game library I've been toying with), but today I feel that it's not the best use of my time as project leader. The difference is the presence of the as-yet-unnamed web client that Mike Sugarbaker broke ground on earlier this year.

While I'm not letting go of my ideal of making some great examples of gaming using SVG, what I really want - as declared in that State of the Volity address - is more players. And that means putting games in the browser, eliminating the need to download and install and launch separate software to use the Volity network and play Volity games. The more I heard about Mike's work over the first months of 2007, the more I became quietly convinced that it's worth putting my whole weight behind as Volity's leader, if I actually want the network to grow at the rates I called for in January.

I've asked Mike to give me a hand in joining this sub-project, which I shall take an active role in. Even though the web client will ultimately run as a volity.net service, we'll treat it as an open-source project with source code stored in Subversion, just as with Gamut. We can't declare any timetables yet, but suffice to say that I'm personally interested in getting it visible as soon as we can. As always, I will post more updates and signposts as they become available.

More money stuff

I wish it were otherwise, but after a few weeks of trial it looks like I'm going to keep Quicken as my financial software of choice for now. This is my third pentannual attempt to use Quicken, but it's the first time that I've been able to have it update all my numbers from all my banks and cards and investments over the Internet.

It turns out that this is a dealmaker; while I still have to go in and categorize everything and make sure there are no duplicates, I love knowing that I'm not missing or mis-entering any numbers. And I definitely prefer this method to hand-entering purchases and deposits and such into the register, as I did in the past. That was always fun for a little while, but as soon as the novelty wore off I would stop using Quicken - and tracking my money - entirely for another four or five years. So that's no longer a danger.

The runner-up is an indie application called iBank, an attempt to do everything Quicken can, except with a much better Mac UI. Sadly, it can't yet connect to banks over the Internet. As soon as it can, I'm running right to it.

...of course as soon as I type this I'm wondering if I'm letting bad-laziness trump good-laziness, and if downloading and importing QIFs of all my accounts for iBank to use would be that much harder. But the likely answer is: yes, it's just inconvenient enough that I'd end up getting way behind. Meh.