Something for Reddit

In my experience, most applications that attempt to take a successful web forum, such as Reddit, and squeeze its functionality into a traditional desktop application fail. This is because these services have grown popular purely because they're part of the world wide web. Remove the ubiquity of the browser and you lose an interface that's tested by millions of users millions of times a day.

Web interfaces are seldom perfect, but successful ones keep out of the way and let the community get on with it. However, there are exceptions to this. In particular, I'm a huge fan of Materialistic, a beautiful Android application that aggregates Hacker News content. Thanks to its material design, and the way it tabs between the original article, the comments, and the new items themselves, it's a huge improvement over the functional web interface, and my preferred way of reading those stories.

Reddit is a different beast entirely, of course. Diode on Android is great if you're strapped for bandwidth, but I've yet to find a desktop application better than Firefox. Something for Reddit is a great attempt, especially if you've got a touch screen. Built around GTK and WebKit2 rendering, it's much like an augmented version of the website or a Reddit Firefox extension. You can log in, quickly access your favorite subreddits, and either view the comments or read the original article, a function that's quicker than the web interface. The design is lovely, with both a dark and light theme, and the colors used for comment demarcation are a big upgrade over the defaults on Reddit. It also uses Vim keybindings for rapid navigation. If you already spend too much time on Reddit, don't install this app. If you need more friends placing little green soldiers everywhere (/r/GreenDawn), install this app.

Project Website

https://github.com/samdroid-apps/something-for-reddit

"Finally, something good comes from Reddit"; discuss.

Emulator Front End

Attract Mode 2.1.0

We've been running a Manjaro-based arcade machine for a while. It's built into an original Bubble Bobble cabinet from the 1980s, but the PCB that once ran the classic Bubble Bobble has been replaced with our Linux PC, now capable of running all kinds of games from all kinds of systems. To provide easy access to all these systems from the joystick interface, our preferred front end has always been a great tool called Wah!cade.

Wah!cade is a highly configurable graphical interface that lets you easily create or use themes to access your game collections. With MAME arcade game emulation, for example, it's relatively easy to use Wah!cade to construct a script that will show you a game's history, its original PCB design, and how the controls are displayed, as well as letting you switch between emulators and favorite lists of games.

But Wah!cade requires a fair amount of configuration, and its development pace has slowed in recent years, so when we upgraded the screen in our arcade cabinet, we thought that rather than rescript our Wah!cade theme, we'd upgrade the software we used as a front end, too. Unlike with Windows, there aren't a huge number of front ends to choose between, but there is one significant new option that wasn't available a couple of years ago, and that's Attract Mode.

The first thing you discover when you install Attract Mode is that it's even more configurable than Wah!cade. Despite being written in C++, its comprehensive theming engine interprets layout files written in the Squirrel programming language. This is a light, high-level object-oriented language that doesn't seem difficult to learn, and editing prebuilt themes should be no different from editing JavaScript. But even if you never open a layout file yourself, Attract Mode looks brilliant without any further tinkering.

The default theme is an animated Pac-Man background, for example, and works well with most screens and aspect ratios. You can easily use the on-screen menu while the application is running to change many of the settings and switch between several of the included alternative themes. Any one of these will fit most screen ratios and resolutions automatically, which is ideal if you're running a screen with vertical orientation. Themes from other users simply need to be dropped into the themes folder for them to appear. Attract Mode is also fast and cross-platform, and it includes both Arduino and Raspberry Pi support, along with Windows and OS X. The community is also very active, with many users sharing and developing their own themes.

Getting started is as easy as installing the package and running the application. First time users are guided through an initial menu tree for adding details about which emulators you want to run. MAME is obviously well supported and is the emphasis for most themes, but Attract Mode supports almost every emulator you can think of, and it's a perfect interface to these and their games if you're building a standalone gaming machine, even if that's a Raspberry Pi and an old joystick.

Project Website

http://attractmode.org

Attract Mode is named after the attention-grabbing demos and sound cues that lonely arcade machines autonomously ran in cinema lobbies.

Almost everything about Attract Mode and the emulator you're using can be configured from within the menu system with a joystick.