This release features major bug fixes and improvements to the EDA library (Ecere Data Access), support for executables and DLLs compression through UPX, an improved EditBox Undo buffer, important optimizations to the region updating engine, as well as a bunch of other bug fixes and improvements.

Download Ecere SDK 0.42.1 for Windows – June 11, 2008 (obsolete)

Download Ecere SDK 0.42.1 for Linux – June 11, 2008  (obsolete)

I’ve been wanting to add a few features to the Ecere Fractals explorer (a sample project in the SDK) ever since I coded it up years ago. I finally took some time to work on it! Improvements include support for smooth coloring; a brand new gradient editor; the option to save with or without computed data; export to image files with bilinear filtering; and some new interesting presets. The new version is included in the SDK and here are some links to pre-built executables and source code:

Download Ecere Fractals Explorer for Windows / Linux / Source

Here is a screenshot of the new version:

and some of my new creations:

I’m pleased to announce the first preview of the Acovel Media Player for Linux. Acovel is currently limited to playing albums: bring up the Media Library, and click on the import button in upper right corner. Choose a folder containing music albums to import, and enjoy an intelligent algorithm which will analyze both ID3 tags and filenames to fill up its music collection database. Acovel’s search feature is amazingly fast (We tested against iTunes search and the results were very impressive). It makes use of the Ecere Database engine (EDB), an extremely light and simple database solution under development.

Acovel has been on hold for a while as I was attending to Linux & Unicode support in the SDK, but now that I’m back on it you can expect a lot more improvements to come in the next few weeks.

Download Acovel 0.01 for Linux

Download Acovel 0.01 for Windows

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the SDK for both Windows & Linux, supporting Unicode and all recent improvements which have been going on in the last 3 months. (The Windows SDK was somewhat outdated, from August). The Linux version features a number of bug fixes and improvements. Quite a few samples have been added as well to showcase the power of the SDK, all released under the BSD license.

Ecere Communicator is now available for Linux. It is an instant messaging client under development supporting AIM/ICQ, MSN and Jabber/XMPP protocols. Basic messaging and contact list functionality (sorry, cannot add contacts yet) are fully working.

A very tiny sample to take a screen shot of the X desktop has been included (code follows) as I’ve found this to be a tedious task to do on my self-built Ecere Linux distribution. It proved itself especially useful while trying to take the attached screen shot with xcompmgr running, somehow the usual xwd, xwdtopnm, pnmtopng utilities didn’t know what to do with the extra alpha channel.

import "ecere"
class ShotApp : GuiApplication
{
   Window window { };
   bool Init()
   {
      Bitmap bitmap { };
      desktop.Grab(bitmap, null, false);
      bitmap.Save("shot00.png", null, null);
      delete bitmap;
      window.Destroy(0);
      return true;
   }
}

I would like to emphasize the very small footprint of the Ecere SDK (libecere.so is all an application needs to run and is only 1.5 MB) and small number of dependencies required to use it. With full functionality, Ecere only requires standard graphic formats, X, GL and core system libraries. It aims to be an alternative to GTK, Qt, GNOME, KDE and therefore doesn’t require any of those. If you ever tried to build them for your LFS (Linux From Scratch), you know how heavy, dependent and long to compile they are. Yet, Ecere already provides a very appealing level of comparable functionality and is still far from what it intends to become.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.7 for: Windows or Linux (obsolete)

Download Ecere Communicator for: Windows or Linux

The 3D chess set is looking quite good, modeled by my friend Gaetan Loyer.
Ecere Chess has a very simple AI, seeing 2 moves of each players ahead…

It doesn’t know anything about openings or endings.

But it will probably still kick your a**.

Here’s the source code.

Linux Executable

Windows Executable

Here’s a very early version of Ecere Communicator for you to try it out.

(Download Windows Executable – zip’ed / Linux Executable – tar’ed)

Communicator can now let you do instant messaging across the Jabber (including Google Talk), AIM/ICQ and MSN protocols.

For some strange reasons a few people were unable to connect to the MSN network, and an error 923 was returned.

Error 923 is said to be an unauthorized .NET kid passport… If anyone has any insight on what that is?

(Download Acovel 0.01 for Windows / Download Acovel 0.01 for Linux )