What's on your Christmas list?

Well, with Christmas only 8 days away (screams with excitement like a little girl), I have been trying to decide what I actually want. Here are the books I would like to get:

• Programming in Objective-C
• Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
  
• LabVIEW for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT

As you can tell, I would LOVE to become an iPhone app developer. And to think it all started with NXT-G (I know, comical). So what's on your Christmas list? NXTFreak

It's here!

I finally released NXText NXC v1; you can check it all out here. One thing I might want to implement is a little startup graphic for NXText, kind of like the startup graphic the NXT firmware uses. Any ideas? If so, please share! NXTFreak

Memory management in NXText NXC

I recently posted over at NXTasy's forums (link) on some issues I have been having with NXText NXC where, after adding the ability to read text files that contain line breaks, my program could only open small files (3 kb).  I therefore decided to take out this ability so that my program could open larger files.  I then started using the ReadLnString function to read text from a text file.  Well, trying to open a 6 kb file took 25-30 seconds using this function!  That is WAY too long.  I posted about my problems in the above-mentioned topic, and Mr. Hansen graciously helped me and came up with a solution.  Using his code, my program can now open a 12 kb file (the largest I have tested so far) in a fraction of a second!  If you render this baby, it ends up being 99 PAGES LONG!  This greatly improved the speed of my program and works like a charm.  I am now very happy...  NXTFreak

Lack of updates...

I apologize for the lack of updates everyone (not that anyone reads my blog).  I have be super busy lately.  I have so much homework to do I'm sure I'm gonna' die (huddles up in corner  and starts rocking back and forth while saying eerily, "Research paper, research paper!")  Yeah so school has been my life.  There hasn't been any progress with NXText NXC, unfortunately.  So what have I been up to lately programming-wise?  Good question.  I guess I'll just have to answer that for ya'.  Are you ready for this?  I'm trying to learn Objective-C/Cocoa!  Cocoa is an object oriented programming language for Mac OS X.  If you don't know what the heck an "object oriented programming language" is, don't worry 'bout it.  Basically, it is a programming language that uses objects.  :-)  Look it up on the web if you want to know more about it.  You see, my hope is to become a computer programmer and to develop applications.  So that's your little update for now.  Farewell...

NXTFreak

Text menus are so awesome...

Alrighty! Sorry guys for not posting in a while. Life's very busy, and that isn't gonna' change until Christmas break (starts drooling). Back on topic, I wanted to go ahead and give you folk's a nice little preview of NXText (NXC) to whet your appetite, and so I did. The pic to the left demonstrates the file list. The cool thing about it is that it resizes. What do I mean by that? I mean if you have more than six files to display, moving the arrow to the very buttom file and then moving it down again will make the list scroll! Pretty cool, huh? And what's even cooler is that I can reuse the text menu because it is contained in a function! You pass a string array to the TextMenu function, and it will display it for you. That way I can use it for sub-menus and such. Well, there's you're little NXText update... NXTFreak

Why oh why?

Don't you just hate it when you spend a good amount of time on some code that you think is going to shrink your program, but then actually makes it larger?  It makes me so sad. :-( I was trying to shrink the Bluetooth code in NXText earlier this morning, and it turns out that after spending a lot of time on it, I just make the code larger.  I have also run into a strange error when using NXText.  Sometimes when I start the program (after starting it and quitting it several times) the menu and the list of files doesn't even show up!  The only fix is to reboot the NXT.  I hope that this error will disappear without me having to do some serious investigation.  So, what programs have you guys been up to lately?  I know that mike1 is working on ChatChatV1 BETA, Robolab 2.9 is working on the On-Brick Programmer, and NXTboy is working on his File Browser.  Can't wait till they all come out!  Feel free to tell me what you are working on! NXTFreak

Managing large programs in NXC

So in the process of porting NXText to NXC, I have found that it can be more confusing and trickier to manage a large NXC program.  Why?  Because the program is composed of lines of text, and those lines of text build up and all look alike!  Also, debugging an NXC program can be very painful.  I hope that someday there will be a debugger for NXC.  NXTFreak

Porting NXText over to NXC...

Yup, you heard right. I am trying to port my NXT program NXText from NXT-G to NXC. In the NXC version, the touch sensor will no longer be needed as a back button, for it will be replaced by the NXT's grey button. Also, the need to type in the name of the file you want to open will no longer be needed; a menu of selectable files will replace it. It's comin' along, but because school has been taking up most of my time, the development has been slow. I just can't wait till I finish it! NXTFreak

First post

Welcome to NXTism everybody! I will hopefully be able to frequently update this blog with my NXT-related dealings. On the side of my blog you can find some different links to NXT websites and the current NXT project I am working on. Hope you guys find my blog interesting and enjoyable at the same time! Have a nice day everyone. NXTFreak