rob terrell

Hey, I’ve finally got something to blog about. So yeah, I got a Wii. You know, it’s for the kids! It’s not for me, honest, honey! I was talking to a friend about the Wii, and we came up with a great idea for a Wii game. But, how could we protoype such a thing?

Now, when we got the Wii, we also got some extra controllers. At the risk of lopsided doubles tennis, I swiped one and took it upstairs. And after following the progress of folks reverse-engineering and coding the Wii remote I decided to try to hack some Wii remote support into the Torque Game Engine. You know, for the kids.

So far: it’s working! And it’s fun. Click the picture above to look at the high-quality screen capture movie (9 MB QuickTime movie). Ignore the dead-tired looking dweeb in the corner (he’s actually having fun, that’s how he shows it) and focus on the Wii remote in his hand. You can also see some of the console debugging in the background.

Here’s another video. This one is crappier looking (YouTube) but it will hurt your bandwidth less:

This video was taken after I improved the control — there’s now a greater “dead” area around the axes, so you don’t accidentally move the view as much. At the start, you can see me mash the “1″ and “2″ buttons, to turn on the bluetooth discovery (all four blue LEDs blink). Also, the “A” button now fires (sent into the game engine as a left mouse button click) and the “B” button walks forward (sent into the game engine as a “w” keypress).

Next step is to get a homemade IR sensor bar on the Mac. Then we’re ready to prototype Wii games on my Mac. See, I’m serious about TGE. Now, finally, for the love of god, won’t GarageGames let me join the Constructor beta?

Update: Sensor bar complete. New video and dead-simple sensor bar construction diagram coming soon. And a binary for anyone who wants to try it.

Looks like sometime last night the http://stinkbot.com web site was accidentally redirected to the robterrell.com web site, creating an endless loop of redirects. That’s what we get for doing web site admin after midnight. Anyway, http://stinkbot.com/Tubesock is back up now.Thanks for your patience.

I finally wrote my first Cocoa-based Mac OS X application. I’m all growns up.

For a while I’d been looking for a good reason to learn Cocoa, but I never found the right project. I overheard someone ask how to get YouTube videos onto their video iPod, and ding! Not too involved, easy enough to do. To make sure it could be done, I wrote a test app in RealBasic. It took about an hour until it was downloading videos just fine. Then, I switched to Cocoa. Sweet jesus, it sucks to learn Cocoa. Four nights later, it’s out of the oven.

Give it a whirl. Tubesock beta.

Found a bug? Please report any problems in the comments.

I’ve written three books about Macs, now long out of print and forgotten, but my one lasting contribution to the Mac universe is Let1kWindowsBloom, a tiny five-line app I threw together to test the speed of Mac OS X beta. After it was mentioned on Macintouch, I received hundreds of hate emails. I suppose they think Mac OS X isn’t slow if nobody points out that it’s slow. (Yes, I know. It’s not slow anymore. Please god, make them stop.)

That was six years ago. Weirdly, it’s still part of the “teh snappy” conversation. Recently I saw some web site using it to benchmark Mac OS X Tiger. It will never die. Get your own copy at http://www.vgg.com/rob/WindowsBloom.html.

My name is Rob Terrell. I moved my web site here from http://www.vgg.com/rob. I can’t exactly remember why. I had a good reason.

A little history: years ago, the url http://www.robterrell.com actually belonged to a totally different Rob Terrell. Apparently he’s an artist in Ann Arbor. He had lots of pictures of cute animals on his site. I guess he’s my opposite. I hated cute animals. He’s the right-brainned left-handed Rob Terrell, and I’m the left-brainned right-handed Rob Terrell. Him: the dark side, me: the light. People thought that the site was mine, and I caught a lot of crap for those cute animals. But I thought it was the worst kind of dorky to have your name as your domain.

Then one day I learned that my friend Cynthia Rojas (http://www.cynthiarojas.com) had her name as her domain name. Suddenly I, too, had to do it. So I wrote a script that checked every day to see if the Evil Rob Terrell slipped up and let his domain registration slide. Eventually, he did.

Evil, perhaps, but not so punctual. Now you can find him at http://www.studiorob.com.

Technorati Profile