So the ‘Pinger’ code of StupidZombie will be no longer maintained and is now officially dead; Instead StupidZombie will be a collection of useful applications, all fun and easy to use.

I’m working on the first one of them so stay tuned, more details will be posted on the main website and this blog of course.

–Jose

Now, comming back to StupidZombie, I’m working on a full migration to JavaFX; I’m kicking the tires and playing with some ideas so stay tuned for new code!

Yeah, has been a long time since I touched the code of StupidZombie; One of the main reasons is that the program did (and still does) what I needed and there was no good reason to push it forward.

But things change, even for the undead

So this year I expect some things to happen, some more exciting than others:

• Refactoring the code base to StupidZombie is easier to compile out of the box. Yes, that is right. The code base is small but I want it to be even more easy to download and compile. Well, also it is a perfect excuse for me to learn how to use Apache Ivy on a small project
• JavaFX. Yes. StupidZombie GUI Swing based interface is ugly, TOO corporate. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping than Oracle do a proper integration with JavaFX and Swing so I can refresh a little the application
• Improvements on the Kenai.com site. I’m waiting for Oracle to move the project to Java.net, until then no news is good news

And that’s it. No huge news but rather realistic deliverable for the project. Also I promise to put more updates on this blog, it’s been really a while since I provided updates on the app.

Please download and enjoy.

José.

—-

A todos los fanaticos de StupidZombie, la versión 1.1 al fin fué liberada. Esta entrega contiene correcciónes importantes, es más rápida y también contiene nueva funcionalidad.

¡Por favor baje la nueva versión y espero que la disfrute!

José.

I think the 1.1 release is just one week away, so stay tuned!

But don’t worry, release 1.2 is not as heavy as 1.1 and Twitter code is pretty advanced. I prefer to release more often than do a mega release, that is all

A quick preview of what is coming:

Use Nimbus!

Nimbus is beautiful, but will require some customizations. Good thing is that is based on Synth and everything can be tweaked using UIManager.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

		for (LookAndFeelInfo laf : 
			UIManager.getInstalledLookAndFeels()) { 
			    if ("Nimbus".equals(laf.getName())) { 
			         try {
						UIManager.setLookAndFeel(laf.getClassName());
					} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (InstantiationException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (UnsupportedLookAndFeelException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} 
			    } 
			}

JavaFX GUI?

Very likely. Here I will try to come with something that looks totally awesome, less “Swingy” . Still, the old GUI will be supported so you will have two flavors of it. Let’s see how that goes, but I expect it to be a combination of Swing + JavaFX.

More localization?

I’m thinking seriously to add more languages to StupidZombie. If the audience is global then it should, right?

OK, too much thinking, time to do some coding instead

So which is the best Twitter library for Java out there? Looks like Twitter4J. I’ll give it a try, but that also means I may have to add Cryptography to StupidZombie as the API requires the user / twitter password in order to send tweets. Or maybe not, as the API seems to support OAuth.