This weekend Graham and I spent some time on the UserVoice suggestions forum, responding to a number of requests and tidying up a few that had become moot. Thanks again to everyone who has participated in that forum over the last year or so – your input has been truly useful. Some of you may find you have votes back.
While we were at it, we identified a couple of areas where the core team is too overextended to do the work, but where there is clearly strong community desire to see changes made: extensions handling and version control. A number of other smaller items have also been tagged as places where volunteers could potentially help out. I’ve posted about all these, and some options for getting started, here:
I would be glad to help where I could be useful. I even see a few areas that would apply to me and my personal goals. One in particular is in extensions. I would be glad to help with any projects there since that seems to be the need.
One question though… would a single download of extensions be useful (I see it in the list)? It seems there is a limit to what can be seen in the “Open Extension” list. I have hit that limit many times, and had to remove extensions just so I can see the ones I use towards the bottom of the list. Yes, I read all of the ones I use. I am strange that way.
I tried loading the Blue Lacuna extensions, and lost three authors from the bottom of the list. And one of them was me! (I write my own for my use… I have thought of submitting them, but am waiting till I test them more).
I’d be interested in working on the Standard Rules Lite extension. Curiously, it doesn’t turn up in a search for VW, maybe because it has 0 votes. Has anyone else expressed interest?
I haven’t heard from anyone else wanting to do it. Votes or no, though, I know of at least two authors who’ve asked for such a thing. ( inform7.uservoice.com/forums/573 … ?ref=title , for those of you following along at home.)
Okay, I’ve tweaked the completed one, and also the portable app request, since Nyx is working on that actively already.
That does still only give you 10 options when you search for vw. It appears that this is only visible as a full list from the admin console, which is very annoying.
There are 16 requests in total. Of those, the SCM and extensions-related ones are already linked from the Inform site. The others are:
Hm. That is not a problem I’ve run into on the Mac, to my knowledge. (Though I may not have absolutely everything loaded, I do have quite a lot of extensions.) This sounds like it might be a reportable bug on whatever system you’re using.
Just out of curiosity, what’s the limit you’re hitting? I have 33 authors listed under the Open Extension menu item, for a total of 159 extensions, including about 17 built-ins.
I have 38 authors and 184 files in the extension folder under “MyDocuments/Inform”. If I add one… one at the end drops off. So that seems to be my limit. I think it is number of extensions though, not number of authors.
I’m willing to help, : I think I can take care of this request:
So I downloaded the osx version of the IDE, then opened “Inform.xcode” which got converted to “Inform.xcodeproj” since i’m using xcode 3.2 (a newer version).
As indicated in “BUILDING.rtf”, I placed zoom’s sources directory next to the IDE’s sources directory. I also added inform63 sources there. (xcode was asking for them, i found them on the inform6 website).
I aslo edited the “ZoomCocoa.xcode” project to “ZoomCocoa.xcodeproj” . It seems like I should do the same for the “CocoaGlk.xcode” project (as of now, it is printed in red) …
I’m only getting one error now, but quite a strange one:
The version of xcode i’m using (3.2) doesn’t support java natively anymore. I added the old java templates to xcode around a year ago (because I like developing java projects within xcode, don’t ask me why) so maybe is the error stemming from this. Could someone try to build the IDE with a “regular” version of xcode, or at least give me some hints as to whether it’s not working for me ?
I’m also willing to help enhancing how inform handles pronouns. I’ve been studying linguistics (with the hope of doing Natural Language Processing later) and I’ve been taught a few theories guidelines about it (focus, topicalization, etc).
Jam is a build utility, and is unrelated to Java. XCode may be telling you that it found a Jamfile in one of the source directories and no longer supports Jam, and therefore can’t build that component.
You may need to get in touch with one of the Inform 7 maintainers to get the most recent compiler sources. I don’t think they are publicly available.
I would be glad to help with any projects there since that seems to be the need.