March 19, 2017

Website

I've made another shift on this space. Rather than continuing with the
web, I'm moving to an older, less complex protocol: gopher.

This has some benefits to me. It's all plain text based, and the less
complex protocol means I don't have the same headaches with rendering
and layouts. It's also much easier now for me to work on it from my
iPad, which I greatly prefer.

Over the next day or two the DNS will point to the new gopher server
instead of the old http server. I'm moving content over here as time
allows, and will maintain the old server as www.forthworks.com for the
current time.

Since gopher isn't widely supported, this space is also available via
http on the standard port 80. It's just an HTML rendered interface to
the gopher based content though.

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Some notes on my projects:

Parable:

Parable is currently on hold. I haven't had time for multiple projects
and it hasn't been successful enough to be a significant focus. I will
be revisiting it later this year once I'm able to stabilize some
things happening in my life.

Retro:

Retro 12 is continuing active development. As my longest running
project (and the most popular), this gets a fair amount of my free
time.

I'm working on two fronts. A Linux version, modeled after Parable's
*pre* interface is being worked on. This will have some I/O for files
and sockets, and I'll use it for a lot of my backend and server tasks
in the coming months.

The other is iOS. Retro continues to do well in the app store and
covers the costs of the Apple development program and some of my
hosting expenses now. In a few weeks I'll have 2017.3 out, with some
further UI improvements (including some highlighting to visually
indicate the code areas as opposed to the documentation areas of
source). I'm looking into exposing more iOS functionality through
Retro, though this will take time to make sure things are sandboxed
enough for App Review.

Little Smalltalk:

LSTv2 now works on 64-bit Linux thanks to Blake McBride.