This is primarily a maintenance release, with various bugfixes accumulated over the last year and updates to the interpreters. It has one major new feature: you can now choose which glulx interpreter to use in the preferences – either the faster git or the reference glulxe.

UPDATE: Zoom 1.1.4 had a minor bug that would cause some glk games to receive too many Redraw events. I’ve updated this release to version 1.1.4.1 to fix this.

Leigh Ribak wasn’t satisfied with this answer, though, and has done a pretty good job of transferring the WinFrotz BZ font into a Mac compatible .dfont file: you can download it here.

To use the font with Zoom, double click it and choose ‘Install Font’, then go to Zoom’s preferences and set it as the symbolic font. The font is displayed as a sample, so the name isn’t exactly legible but luckily thanks to its name it will probably be right at the end of the list.

You may also need to play with the interpreter setting in the Game tab if you’ve changed it: set it to DECsystem-20 if you want to be asked by BZ whether or not to use the new font.

Technical

Synchronisation

Something I would really like to implement is the ability to synchronise with Zoom running on a Mac, so when you plug your iPhone in, all your latest saved games are copied between the two applications, and any story files that you’ve selected get copied onto the phone.

Synchronising over wifi is possible, I suppose, but it would be nicer to have iTunes do it for you when you plug your phone in.

Obtaining games

I haven’t decided on the methods for obtaining stories yet. I think that this should be reasonably easy: provide an interface to the IFDB that works when the phone has a wifi connection. Synchronisation would be nice, but it can’t be the only way that stories are put onto the phone, because PC users would be left out in the cold.

Auto-save

Interpreters running on the iPhone are really going to need this. I doubt users would appreciate a ‘are you sure’ dialog when you hit the home button and losing game state just because a phone call has arrived is really poor form.

Zoom supports this, so this should be easy for Z-Code. glulx doesn’t, though: I’ll have a look at hacking this into the interpreter, but it really needs to be a part of the specification for any IF interpreter (even on the desktop)

Licensing

CocoaGlk is currently licensed under the LGPL and distributed as a framework. This isn’t appropriate for the iPhone, as there’s no such thing as a framework and the LGPL requires things that are statically linked to be under the LGPL as well. That means almost no interpreters as many are under incompatible licenses.

The solution is to change the license to one that is less restrictive: probably the MIT or modified BSD license.

A more serious issue is that Apple’s SDK license prohibits downloading code to interpret: this means that it would be impossible to load any games that were not bundled with the interpreter. I think this is probably a fatal problem: it seems doubtful that many IF authors will be willing to pay the $99 required to get their work onto the iPhone – plus it would mean no Zork, ever.

User Interface

I haven’t really decided on how the UI should work. The basic functionality should be pretty simple, but there are a few issues new to running on a small display:

Complex graphics

Games like moments out of time use a complex window layout that won’t work too well if we use a large enough font to be legible when everything is on screen. So, it would seem sensible to have a Safari-like ability to zoom in and out.

However, games with a more traditional layout won’t really benefit from this, so we’re going to need to be clever and detect when we need to have a zooming display and when a simple, more legible, display is useful – some experimentation is required! The initial version will go for the ‘big but simple’ approach, which should work with the majority of IF games that are out there, but I’m not going to be satisfied until games like City of Secrets and Moments Out of Time run and look good.

Text entry

This is pretty crucial to get right. The iPhone keyboard isn’t ideal for typing lots of stuff in, so CocoaGlk is going to need to help out. Luckily, I can borrow ideas liberally from the Palm interpreters that already exist:

• Tapping on a word in a text window should insert it as input (with an animation + a quick way of undoing accidental taps)
• Tap + hold on the center of the display should pop up a compass rose. Dragging in a direction will enter that direction as a command.
• If possible, I’d like any words the game prints that don’t exist in the autocompletion dictionary to be added, at least for as long as CocoaGlk is running: that should make typing those made up magic words a lot easier.
• There also needs to be a way of getting a list of common verbs. I’m thinking that if a tap+hold on the center brings up a compass, one on the right side of the screen should bring up the verb list – drag to select a verb (the verb under where the user taps would be blank to avoid accidental input)
• Possibly the tap+hold gestures should be duplicated in a toolbar along the bottom of the screen (or only done that way if it works better)

There’s a tap+hold gesture on the left hand side that’s not being used in this scheme, so if someone thinks of some other useful shortcut, that could go there. The reason for using a tap+hold to bring up shortcuts is that dragging is more sensibly used to scroll around the game output.

Even so, I plan to port CocoaGlk as soon as I get my hands on it, at least assuming the requirements for distributing free software aren’t too onerous. $99 for a key doesn’t sound too bad to me, anyway.

I’m not entirely sure what to expect; I haven’t played around with jailbreaking my iPhone, so I’ll be going in blind. What I think is likely, however, is that half of CocoaGlk will port just fine: that is, the GlkClient framework that interfaces with the interpreters. What is less certain is how well the UI half will port: that is, GlkView. If NSTextView is ported, and the typesetter behaves the same way, then it’s going to be really easy to get the UI working in some manner, and probably not that hard to support all the features of blorb.

Getting games onto the phone is also a bit of a challenge. I think that taking some of Zoom’s existing inventory management and connecting to IFDB might be a good idea.

I’ll post a beta when I get things working: I imagine a glulx or frotz-based interpreter is likely to be released first. I’ve been thinking about doing something with LLVM to JIT games; something that would be a curiosity on the fast machines that CocoaGlk runs on at the moment, but which could be vital to running games on the much slower iPhone.

Read on for the complete change list and some screenshots…

Changes in this version:

• I’ve switched back to use the Carbon API for speech synthesis, as the Cocoa API fails to take account of the preferences the user has set in the speech preference pane.
• Fixed various bugs that were preventing Zoom from running glk-based games on Leopard.
• Made clear_attr and set_attr less fussy about being called on object 0 for version 3 games. This works around a bug in Infocom’s Witness.
• Added a new set of options to the Speech menu to make it easier to navigate around previous moves, and to make it possible to ask Zoom to stop speaking
• Added a plugin manager that makes it possible to check for updates to the interpreters that Zoom can use to play games and install them:

• Added support for IFDB ’signpost’ files to support downloading and installing any missing plugins before loading a game.
• Added a browser for IFDB:

• Fixed an issue that was preventing glk intepreters from working on Leopard
• Added a QuickLook plugin that allows you to preview saved games.

• Added CoreAnimation to certain transitions: popping up the ‘downloading’ window, disappearing the controls when transitioning to the IFDB and when transitioning to full-screen mode.
• Fixed a long-standing bug where the interpreter number would be ignored (this makes it possible to adjust it to fix the graphics in Beyond Zork, for example)
• Fixed a crash that could occur when adjusting the colours in the preferences window.
• Changed many icons so that they have a 512×512 alternative under Leopard to improve the display when using CoverFlow – this includes the main Zoom icon and the icons for Glulx, HUGO and TADS games.

Zoom 1.1.1 fixes these issues and adds many new features to the plug-in system so now Glulx, TADS and Hugo games all get the same save-game features as Z-Code games, at least as far as is possible with their respective interpreters.

Read on for the complete change log. Zoom 1.1.1 is brought to you by the revision number 2691.

Changes in this release:

• CocoaGlk upgraded to version 1.0.3
• Used Sparkle to add a ‘Check for Updates’ feature
• Glk plugins now create save games in a special ‘glksave’ package, which means that they now have the same features as Z-Code save games (Zoom keeps track of which save game goes with which story file, save games show up in the iFiction window, skein and transcript are resumed after restoring, etc). Note that limitations in the design of the Glulx and Hugo interpreters means that it is not possible to make these load a save game immediately on startup.
• ‘Restore’ from a game will now restore the skein as well as the game state, so now it’s not necessary to use the iFiction window to load save games in order to restore the skein as well.
• The ‘Filter’ and ‘Save’ buttons in the iFiction window now change colour to indicate when there are filters in effect or saved games available.
• Added opt+S, opt+I and opt+F keyboard shortcuts for switching between the three views in the top of the iFiction window
• Games with no iFiction metadata, or missing metadata for the ‘Group’ column will now automatically get a group indicating the type of game (Z-Code, TADS, Hugo)
• Text-to-speech now works with Glk TADS (which incorrectly uses put_buffer to write to windows)
• Bug fixes:
  • TADS 3 games now save and restore correctly
  • TADS 3 games should now restore much more quickly
  • Preferences are now properly set in the X11 version so you won’t see black text on a black background.
  • Saved game states should now correctly identify the associated Z-Code game when it is being identified by a UUID instead of by checksum and serial number
  • Fixed an issue that was preventing transcripts from saving properly in any Glk game
  • Dragging and dropping a story file that’s managed by a plugin to the iFiction window will now deal correctly with the story’s metadata.
  • Fixed a weird issue where if you tried to rename a plug-in game in the iFiction window Zoom would move it, but would then immediately forget the new filename
  • Fixed an issue that could occur if the organiser directory contained an empty directory that used to contain a valid game. (This mainly caused Zoom to spam the console with messages about not being able to find a story with a particular ID)
  • Fixed an issue that was making it possible to use the iFiction window to open too many copies of a story
  • Fixed an issue in CocoaGlk that could sometimes cause Hugo save games to become corrupted
  • Fixed an issue that could cause a crash if an abbreviations table is absent from a game.

Read on for the complete list of changes.

Changes in this version:

• Bug fixes
  • Opening a file that doesn’t exist for random access will now create the file (something that’s required by the glk specification but probably isn’t a good idea in practice)
  • Fixed a memory leak in the More view
  • Fixed a potential infinite loop when cancelling sessions
  • Fixed an issue that could cause the layout engine to run past the end of the text in a view
  • Fixed a memory leak in the GlkPreferences object
  • Fixed a crash that could occur if the glk window was closed before the startup image had finished fading out
  • gestalt_Unicode now returns the right value
  • Buffered put character events are no longer concatenated into put string events if they have a value less than 32 (this could cause file corruption in some circumstances due to the way OS X handles these in NSString objects)
  • putBuffer: events sent to windows now send strings via the automation system – this ensures that broken interpreters that use these instead of putString: events will work with things like skeins, text to speech, etc.
• The GlkView delegate has been updated to make it possible to customize how files are prompted for.
• Added cocoaglk_set_immediate_style_hint(), cocoaglk_clear_immediate_style_hint() and cocoaglk_set_custom_text_attributes() functions to make it possible to implement more complicated font/styling models than the standard glk model.
• Added cocoaglk_get_stream_for_key() to make it possible to pass in extra streams to a client beyond just the main input stream (this is intended for use with clients that can restore a saved game as well as loading an actual game)
• When file streams belonging to the server process are opened for reading in the client, they are now buffered to increase performance for small reads.

I’ve made a patch for this problem, which you can download here.

(Updated 13/07/07 to fix a further issue which could result in some games now having psychedelic colours. Sigh.)