That’s right! I’m not dead, just… resting.

Zoom 1.1.5 is finally out! This version fixes several issues relating to Snow Leopard and Lion, and updates the git and glulxe interpreters to the latest versions. This is particularly important for git, as 1.2.4 (which was shipped with Zoom 1.1.4) had some critical bugs that could result in corrupted save games.

I’ve also brought the way that the source is published up to date: you can now get the latest version at any time via git (no, not that git, the other one). You can fetch it like this:


git clone code.logicalshift.co.uk/zoom/zoom.git


Zoom 1.1.4.1 has been released.

This is primarily a maintenance release, with various bugfixes accumulated over the last year and updates to the interpreters. It has one major new feature: you can now choose which glulx interpreter to use in the preferences – either the faster git or the reference glulxe.

UPDATE: Zoom 1.1.4 had a minor bug that would cause some glk games to receive too many Redraw events. I’ve updated this release to version 1.1.4.1 to fix this.

The question that I probably get asked the most about Zoom for OS X is ‘how do I get the Beyond Zork font?’ The answer since I ported it to Cocoa has been ‘you can’t', unfortunately: the old system for displaying the font simply didn’t work with the new Cocoa display.

Leigh Ribak wasn’t satisfied with this answer, though, and has done a pretty good job of transferring the WinFrotz BZ font into a Mac compatible .dfont file: you can download it here.

To use the font with Zoom, double click it and choose ‘Install Font’, then go to Zoom’s preferences and set it as the symbolic font. The font is displayed as a sample, so the name isn’t exactly legible but luckily thanks to its name it will probably be right at the end of the list.

You may also need to play with the interpreter setting in the Game tab if you’ve changed it: set it to DECsystem-20 if you want to be asked by BZ whether or not to use the new font.

So, Apple have (finally) released the iPhone SDK today. developer.apple.com is apparently too busy celebrating this momentous occasion to actually bother to respond to any http requests so I haven’t had a chance to look at the SDK yet.

Even so, I plan to port CocoaGlk as soon as I get my hands on it, at least assuming the requirements for distributing free software aren’t too onerous. $99 for a key doesn’t sound too bad to me, anyway.

I’m not entirely sure what to expect; I haven’t played around with jailbreaking my iPhone, so I’ll be going in blind. What I think is likely, however, is that half of CocoaGlk will port just fine: that is, the GlkClient framework that interfaces with the interpreters. What is less certain is how well the UI half will port: that is, GlkView. If NSTextView is ported, and the typesetter behaves the same way, then it’s going to be really easy to get the UI working in some manner, and probably not that hard to support all the features of blorb.

Getting games onto the phone is also a bit of a challenge. I think that taking some of Zoom’s existing inventory management and connecting to IFDB might be a good idea.

I’ll post a beta when I get things working: I imagine a glulx or frotz-based interpreter is likely to be released first. I’ve been thinking about doing something with LLVM to JIT games; something that would be a curiosity on the fast machines that CocoaGlk runs on at the moment, but which could be vital to running games on the much slower iPhone.

Zoom version 1.1.2 is now available here. The main new feature in this version is integration with the IFDB site, as well as a much improved plugin manager. This version also fixes some Leopard compatibility issues and adds support for QuickLook, both for story files (displaying cover art and bibliographic information in the Finder) and for save game files (displaying the complete transcript that lead up to the save command).

Read on for the complete change list and some screenshots…

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I’ve now released GlkTerm version 1.0.3. This is an update to the previous version of GlkTerm that uses the new 1.0.3 version of CocoaGlk.

Well, it seems that some of the new features in Zoom 1.1.0 had a few of the usual .0 release issues. I’m not sure how I managed to miss that TADS 3 games were failing to save.

Zoom 1.1.1 fixes these issues and adds many new features to the plug-in system so now Glulx, TADS and Hugo games all get the same save-game features as Z-Code games, at least as far as is possible with their respective interpreters.

Read on for the complete change log. Zoom 1.1.1 is brought to you by the revision number 2691.

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CocoaGlk 1.0.3 is now available. This version of CocoaGlk mainly focuses on bug fixes, but also includes a couple of new features aimed at making it easier to port multimedia interpreters and customise client behaviour.

Read on for the complete list of changes.

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GlkTerm is a simple application designed to help with writing glk client applications. Download this if you want to write a new IF interpreter on OS X, or if you want to port an existing one.

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Zoom 1.1.0 has been released. This version fixes all the remaining known major bugs in 1.1.0beta3. As usual, accompanying this release is an updated version of CocoaGlk, version 1.0.2.

There is also an updated manual for this version of Zoom.