Who?
Whoa, slow down, thats a mouthful of questions! I'll start with perhaps the
least interesting answer first, who. Me! As you may have gathered, my name
is Matt, and I'm a mudder. Oh, and a student in the United Kingdom, too.
You can check out my homepage here if you want to find out
more about me. My partner-in-crime is Stephen McGarrity, who is
strangely also a mudder, and stranger still, a student in the UK
(although, he's in Scotland, and I'm not).
What?
This is perhaps easiest to answer, since as you may have already guessed
the answer. Spod! is to be a mud client which will hopefully put a new
twist on an old theme, so to speak. We hope to add some fairly original
features, many of which seem quite twee, and
fairly pointless. Then again, we have some ideas which seem a bit more
worthwhile. You'll just have to wait and see. Oh, and try Spod! too.
Why?
Why not? No, seriously, Spod! began its life when I was
thinking about creating a custom client for my own mud, but I rapidly saw
ways to expand it outwards into something that would be more useful for
the whole mudding community. Also, I have yet to find a GUI client that I
like (on any platform, but particularly Linux/X11 which I use most of the
time), and certainly think there is room for growth in this area. It
seemed logical to make Spod! more generally useful to mudders, to
encourage its use for connections to Caffeine, too.
When?
Spod! is available right now, from the download
page on this site (obviously enough). It's not finished - I don't think it
ever will be, since as with much freely available software, its in a
permanent state of development.
How?
Spod! is to be implemented in Java, for
three main reasons. Firstly, I've been wanting a real programming project
in Java for some time. Secondly, the multi-platform implications are
fantastic for an application like this, and thirdly, I really like some of
the elements of Java and some of its other implications (this ties into
the first, I suppose).