Grom, SweetNES
If anyone still reads this or is following the SweetNES project I regret to inform you that the project is dead. I’ve taken the most recent code and archived it on my personal storage should I every decide to return to it. I think my goals on the project were just a little too lofty.
The good news, however, is that I’ve started a new project that I call Grom. It is a text editor control.
This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and have made several attempts over the years. In every case, as with the SweetNES project, my eyes are too big and my sights are too high. I feel like I’m learning from those mistakes though and I’ve made my goals much more realistic this time.
The first point of realism is that I’ve borrowed the text editor control that ships with SharpDevelop. I frequently suffer from the “not invented here” syndrome and start from scratch (which seems to be directly linked to my failure to complete projects). This time I will be using their control as a starting point for my own ideas.
I should point out that I first felt that I could make my changes to the text control available to the SharpDevelop team for their benefit. However, after some consideration and some time on the SharpDevelop contributors mailing list I felt that my style, pace, and goals clashed to hard.
The control has some great features. It is fairly battle-tested and most importantly, will get me rolling quickly. Without trying to sound critical, it also has several week points. The code is unorganized and poorly documented, the original architecture has become lost, there is no foreign language support, the API is not very friendly, and many other problems too numerous to mention. Still, it’s better than starting from scratch.
The first several releases of Grom will be solely for the purpose of updating and refactoring the text editor library. The Grom application is really more of a platform for the control, with the control being the primary focus of the project.
Updated [4/2/2008]: Changed the post to clarify that the Grom project is about the text editor control and not an application.