Aart's Blog

With an eye on California's water shortage, we decided to do some water-efficient landscaping. With enormous help of my sister, we converted a corner of our front lawn into a mini cacti corner. In another corner, far away from playing children, we decided to put some larger, more thorny cacti. Hopefully this way we can keep the garden green with less water!

This weekend a large branch of my neighbor's tree broke and fell into our garden, right on top of our swing and patio furniture. Luckily nobody was hurt, since we all just came back from church when it happened. The swing broke most of the fall and even the solar panels survived! Needless to say I spend the rest of the day cutting wood, very kindly assisted by neighbors from all sides!

The last few weeks, I received many very kind emails as well as positive comments at the Android Market about my games. This has been a very nice contrast with the sometimes rough comments or emails I also get (constructive feedback is always welcome, but please study the rules of the game before you complain :-)). So I just wanted to say thank you to all that took the time to write a nice email or comment!

By popular request, I have changed the trackball input of Chess for Android slightly. When the trackball cursor hovers over the chessboard, it is displayed as a rectangle that moves one square at the time. When the trackball cursor leaves the chessboard, it changes into the "old-style" cursor that moves several pixels at the time. Please let me know if you like this new input mechanism better.