Project Update

My Pango Bindings are up and running! I now how the power to locate, display, and format text on a two dimensional screen with lisp. It is integrated with Cairo, which allows me to draw and manipulate my text any way I wish. It's a very powerful solution. I want to add the pixbuf library as well. This will allow me to save images in almost any format. This will be useful for more then my application so I will release it as the CL-PCP (Pango, Cairo and PixBuf) bindings. The CFFI is an excellent tool and I am very happy using it so far. I have a few more minor things to add to PCP, but when I am done I will put it up on cliki.net for others to use.

I will also need to get cl-opengl to work again. I updated my CFFI and it seems to have broken things. My test application no longer works. Still, I think I can troubleshoot it. With openGL, I will be able to begin my work in earnest. I will have to extend cl-opengl since it doesn't handle picking objects yet, but that's a minor issue. I'm getting very excited about all this working together, unfortunately, I haven't had much time to work on it. I have a job, a wife, a baby on the way, three families, two cats and a dog. So I'm fitting this project into the cracks of my life. Still, the only time I seem to be using is my game time. In a way I think of this as my own game, and in many ways, it may become one. We will see. I still need to pick a name, but I finally have a way of simply describing it.

This whole application works on a very simple principle, the smallest common denominator. To explain, the smallest common denominator is the simplest thing that ties two or more things together. For example, all information can be expressed as text. The Unix operating system is based on this, so I'll go out on a limb and say it's a good idea. This is the first part of my project. The Lisp programming language handles this nearly perfectly. The other part is displaying the data. Well, all data can be displayed in three dimensions. Text windows fit in 3D. Video games fit in 3D. Everything (except sound) on a computer can be seen in 3D. Web pages can be seen in 3D, by compressing them to a plain, as can text documents, videos, and graphs. Graphs can also be seen in 3D, as can columns of flat pages or a 3D schematic. I want to put this power into the users' hands. When this is done, I hope that people will be able to use their computers in new and mind-boggling ways. It's not that far off, but I want to see it done right.

I hope to work on it more tonight. I'll keep updating as long as I keep working.