TODEPOND PONDCAST: No escape

Well, it's time for another weekly episode of the...

🐸 TODEPOND PONDCAST 🐸

What's new this week?

No escape

I'm in Portugal right now. Because tomorrow (Monday), I'm doing a presentation about CellPond. I think it'll be livestreamed! Come and watch!

This past week, I've been polishing and refining my presentation, which feels oddly similar to editing a video.

It's so hard to decide what to keep in, and what to cut. There are so many 'deleted scenes' that I was sad to get rid of. But I need to squeeze into the twenty-minute time slot.

I'm finding it hard to balance 'demonstrations' and 'explanations'. Demonstrations make the talk engaging and fun. And they show off what you're there to show! But their purpose might not be clear if you don't have enough explanation around it.

On the other hand, if you have too much explanation, and not enough demo, the talk will be dry. And you'll waste all of your time chatting away - failing to show what you've come to show.

I hope I can strike the right balance. I think I'll err on the side of "too much demo" because I can always get to the explanation in the questions.

Triangles

Last week, I planned to add a few features to CellPond. This week, I added them!

The screen now shows you when you're paused, and it unpauses automatically when you reset. I also fixed a bunch of bugs with high resolution screens, and a couple of keyboard issues. 

But most importantly, I added a new way to change colours. Here it is:

*ahem*

In CellPond... triangles have been available since the start. Just pull one down from the toolbar at the top of the screen!

They look like an arrow. They show that 'something' becomes 'something else'. You can use them in your rules.

🟥 ▶️ 🟦
"Red becomes blue"

By default, they point to the right. But you can also make them point up or down. Up triangles do something complicated. Down triangles do nothing.

But now, they do something else too. And for that, we need them to be able to point in *any* direction.

Continued in the next part...

Spin

There are now just two buttons on each triangle, instead of the three that were previously there. One button spins it clockwise. The other one spins it the other way.

This means you can point your triangle in any direction. Up, down, left, or right.

And you can place a triangle into the colour picker.

An "up" triangle tells the colour to increase one of its values. If you place it into the red channel, and then paint on the screen with it, you'll increase the red value of whatever you brush over.

The "down" triangle is similar. It tells the colour to decrease the value of that channel. Decrease red, or decrease green, or decrease blue.

It might sound complex, but it feels like learning how to mix paint in school. Except it's with a slightly different colour wheel. Add red to blue to get pink. Remove green from yellow to get red.

What about the "left" and "right" triangles? They copy a value from one channel to another. If you point right from the green channel, it'll copy whatever's in the blue channel. If you point left, you'll copy from the red channel.

It's a way of moving information around. And it was needed to make the Reed element in the 🤖 Nothing video. Finally, it's possible again! And hopefully it feels a lot simpler than the original 'diamond' method.

All of this work is thanks to you! Thank you so much for supporting me and my projects. I'll let you know how the presentation goes. And I'm looking forward to getting back and getting this video done. Until then, wherever you are in the world... I hope you have a great week 🐸

Days since tode fell asleep: 290
Days since bot went missing: 255