The Elementalist for Mac!

Phew!  The wait is over for all you fine Mac users out there!

As with the last post this ended up being more than I had initially bargained for, but now is the time to iron out the wrinkles.  What I discovered after getting the installer working was that the Mac was not sending all of the key events that I was expecting through the standard Java keyboard listening interfaces.  When I held down a key I would get a few events but then it would just keep telling me the key was being released...  Argh!!!  Yet another keyboard ruined with my face.

This is due to the "accents" pop-up that Mac enables for users by default.  There is a relatively simple way to disable it via the Terminal (see this post if you are curious: How to disable accents and enable key repeat in OSX), but as before I did not want to have to suggest that users jump through any bonus hoops to try The Elementalist out.  I spent a lot of effort trying to get around this in various ways but the short of it is that native Java just does not get these events from the operating system and there is no way to disable the accents menu programmatically through Java.

Luckily I was able to use the native interface library that I have been using to detect controller inputs to get the keyboard inputs at a lower level, bypassing the accents feature altogether.  So far I am really happy with those results and I hope you will be too!

Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can't get some dual boot action with Ubuntu set up on another machine and get started on the Debian based installer.  But for tonight I'm going to enjoy this small win with a delicious malt beverage and wish you all the best!

Cheers,
Zack