PlayControl Software

At least from my perspective, there has been a surprising amount of work and effort put into the (upcoming) maintenance release of SDL 1.2.14 for the Mac. Many of the changes have been focused on modifying the Mac code base to support Snow Leopard, particularly 64-bit. As I understand it, Ryan Gordon has spent the time cleaning up the codebase with help from user patch submissions in the SDL Bugzilla to modernize the codebase. (Thank you to all of you that have submitted patches.)

Meanwhile, I have been focusing on modernizing the Xcode projects, Xcode application templates, doing testing, updating documentation, and working on the official binary distribution.

Ugh. C++ always finds another way to irk me.

I finally upgraded one of my systems to Snow Leopard and am trying out all the new compilers (gcc 4.2, llvm/gcc, clang). In addition, Apple sent me back a bug report telling me they fixed a problem with OpenAL buffer unqueuing returning the wrong buffer id, and wanted me to test it in Snow Leopard. 

Being OpenAL, I could have submitted a plain C example, but I wanted to use some standard data structures so Apple couldn't accuse my code of being buggy. I wanted a GUI too to help trigger the problem, so I obviously used Cocoa/Obj-C to build the UI. But from past experience, I knew the Core Audio team likes C++ and I really wanted them to fix my bug, so I decided to use STL data structures instead of Cocoa data structures hoping the code might look more inviting to them.

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One of the things I miss from the days just before the great Linux/Bitkeeper schizm is the Bitkeeper GUI front-end tools. Obviously, since the great fallout, I have moved away from Bitkeeper and have been alternating between Git and Mercurial as I get the chance. But to this day, I still miss the GUI tools Bitkeeper provided. They were written in Tk and damn ugly, but the overall design was pretty good and integrated well with my workflows at the time.

I remember struggling to get better Mac support for the Bitkeeper tools way back then as they required X11. Once upon a time, there was a way you could redirect Bitkeeper to use an Aqua/Tk so you at least didn't have to go through X11 (which had even less integration on those older Mac OS X versions than today's versions if you can believe it). …