At long last, an Update!!!

Finally getting back to work. Just a quick update for those of you that actually take a look at my progress. Earlier this week I was having a major problem with parsing the incoming text. (For those of you who don't know what a parser does, it breaks up all the text into chuncks. In this case it breaks up the text into 23-letter lines that can be displayed easily on the DS's screens.) At first I thought it was a problem with the parser, then after having some problems display text, I thought it was the display functions.

Turns out it was both. I ended up taking my C functions and re-working them using XCode (Mac IDE from Apple). One of the problems was the way I was having the text put inside of the arrays. Turns out in C, you need a NULL character (basically a character that represents nothing) at the end of each line to mark the end of it. If you don't, when you try to print the line out, it goes into the next lines until it hits the last line or a NULL character. Thankfully I was able to find this problem while working on a plain, text-based program for PC and fix it.

The display problemis another matter. Seems I have my coordinets all mixed up. I need to do some research on the proper way to use the display function I am using (the one that can print text sideways). For now, I am just displaying text normally (IE not book-style) for debugging of the parser. Hopefully this weekend I will be able to fix the text printing problem. If not, I will just have to move on and use normal text displaying. I am on a tight timetable.

Goals for Weekend:

• Get parser working for multipile pages in PC "test" program and DS "alpha" program
• Get text displaying properly in book-style mode in DS "alpha"
• Get page turning working
• Start work on GUI

The first three tasks are the most important for me to get working. I can spend next week working on the GUI. Getting the code to work is the most important thing. I really need to show my book "storage" structure is more efficient then what other's have used in the past. I don't need a GUI for that.

Will post an update on Saturday and Sunday for those of you who want to know my progress. See you then.

PS Not sure if anyone will care, but I did end up getting a Mac. I ended up getting a MacBook Pro instead of the iMac and it has really helped with the development. Also, its a nice machine to boot. After using it for over a week, I decided against installing Windows XP and Ubuntu (Linux) on it. I am doing all command line/"test" programming in Leopard and actual DS programming in a Windows XP Virtual Machine under VM Fusion. Seems to be working out nicely.