Wanna buy a keyboard?

It's cool, sexy, beautifully designed and the thing that all the cool kids want. It is however still essentially a laptop keyboard for a desktop computer. I'm sure it's great for the average Mac user but for someone who hammers away at a keyboard for 8 hours a day it's just not good. I'm sure the wrist pain would subside in time but it just feels too cramped. I plugged in my PC ergonomic keyboard today and it felt like undoing the top button on those jeans you still wear from when you were in your 20's. It felt so free and easy. I did however only make this choice to go back because I found some decent software to map the PC ctrl-windows-alt keys to the correct places for the Mac's ctrl-alt-cmd keys. I even got my " and @ in the right place! Still no # key, but I've discovered that on alt-3. There's still a few crazy keymappings but it'll do for now. I also now have a very strange thing happening. Randomly the shift key sticks on. Not physically but the keyboard mapper says it's on. Pressing both shift keys together seem to do it but I'm sure it's doing it without this combination. I've checked and Sticky Keys is turned off so this shouldn't happen. And it won't turn off once it's happened. I have to pull the plug on the keyboard to fix it. Very annoying!

So, does anyone want to buy a cool Mac wireless keyboard? £40 to a good home. Anyone?

While hammering away at the code today something dawned on me. I'm writing my game in C++. Mainly because I know this language extensively and I've never seen Objective C before last week. I've limited the Objective C to the bits of the code that get called from the system and then just pass control and any relevant data on to the C++ code. This is when it occurred to me that all of my code would probably just compile on the PC with no adjustment. So, a plan came to mind. If one were to write for instance a library on PC that you could link to which passed on startup and shutdown data along with mouse click information and you also incorporated a pass through for the relevant OpenGL commands you could essentially write an iPhone game on a very basic PC iPhone emulator. It would only emulate basic touch input and OpenGL drawing, but this is the majority of your game coding anyway. It's an interesting idea if someone wants to write an iPhone game without shelling out for a Mac. Eventually you'd need the Mac to do the final testing and add sound and save data etc. but for those just wanting to give it a go it would be very handy. Hmmmm, if only I had the time! I'm currently trying to convince a friend to write the emulator. I need to find a big carrot to offer him.

My good friend John filled me in on how I can build versions for all my volunteer testers today so I'll be rolling out a demo to people tomorrow. I'm hoping to get some feedback on the control and if it crashes anywhere. This will be a great help as I'm not going to have time to test it myself before submission.

Today has been a bad day for coding. I've had the estate agent around most of the morning and lunch time showing people around. I did however fix a couple of problems I had with the gameplay and restructure some of the source code that was written in haste and needed some restructuring.

I do think however I'm developing cabin fever. I've been snowed in all week and it just snowed non stop today. I've unfortunately (or luckily) got no snacks in so in between meals I'm drinking gallons of tea and coffee. I must gather the huskies tomorrow and try and get to the shop for some supplies.