Spotlight: Three items that caught my fancy recently...

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We've got three exciting items in the SPOTLIGHT this month:

The first is the winners of the 2002 Liberty Basic Challenge Contest. We were excited about the number of people who put effort into creating and entering fine quality programs into the contest. It is a shame that all of the contestants could not win, but that is the nature of a contest. All of us at LBNEWS want to thank everyone who submitted a program, as well as those of you who took the time to review the entries and vote.

Here is the announcement that Alyce Watson made regarding the contest and the winners on May 1st, 2002:


ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS!

The polls have closed for the 2002 Liberty BASIC Challenge. Thanks very much to everyone who participated, either to enter a program or to vote. There was tremendous variety in the programs submitted to this contest. The voting was very close in ALL categories. We have all gained something very special from the participants who shared their code and their ideas so generously. Thanks to all!


CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS!

Winner, Newbie Challenge:
Slot Machine - by Kenny Bruce

Winner, Oldbie Challenge:
RPN Calculator - by David Drake

Winner, Game Challenge:
Raining Cats and Dogs - by Mitchell Kotler

Winner, Open Category:
Polar Phun by - Tom Nally


All the submissions are available online at the YahooGroups site for LBNEWS - in the files section:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lbnews/files/

Also, the winners are being featured at the ABC Archives website as Walt Decker points out in message 18233 on the LBNEWS site:

The winners are now featured on the ABC Specials page:

http://www.allbasiccode.com/downloads/specials/special.html

Walt Decker
ABC Archives Webmaster

(Thank you Walt and Alyce both for your hard work and effort in seeing the contest through. Thank you Carl and Alyce for supplying prizes.)


The second item in the Spotlight is an innovative idea that was recently discussed on the Liberty Basic Group. Laz has written a pretty neat packer for packing files (bmp's, wav's, etc) into a single file, even concatenating it onto the LB run time itself. Here is what he says:

"...I found the best way to include files is to include them to the end of an exe or some other file. Or to just put them all into a file by themselves. Then when you need them just unpack them. The code to unpack the files is small. Of course the more files you add the larger the code becomes. I have included files to the runtime for LB and unpacked them."

His packer is still in beta testing, but it is available at the following address (watch for line wraps):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertybasic/files/laz/include_file.bas

Read more about it in messages 5867 and 5874 on the web at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertybasic/message/5867


Finally in the spotlight this month is a little more on awards. It was a real pleasure to see that a program written in Liberty Basic has received wide public acclaim and recognition. I am of course talking about Eldron Gill's impressive, commercial quality application Birthday Keeper. Here is what Alyce Watson observed:

If you want to see a commercial program written in Liberty BASIC that has won '5 star' awards from TWO ratings services, check out Birthday Keeper by Eldron Gill here:

http://members.tripod.com/~eaglesoar/eagle.html

Way to go, Eldron!

- Alyce

Yes indeed Eldron - Way to go. I certainly am inspired, I hope you are too.

-Brad Moore

Home

Dumping a file directly into a texteditor
Three items that caught my fancy recently...
Serial Communication with LB
David Drake reviews Image321.DLL
Translating Documentation
Implementing an editor with Scintilla.dll