Marco Era’s blog

I’ve always complained about how “static” programs look, if compared to websites. Graphics is something software engineers rarely care about (as we are too deeply focused on the algorithms), while it’s essential for web designers.

Anyway, in my experience, most users aren’t enough skilled to appreciate what goes behind the scene, so sometimes programs’ appearance can make the difference.

In the last weeks I had some spare time, so I decided to write a simple C++ library that loads GIF files and animates them on the screen. While it started as a joke, it soon became challenging and brought my mind back to the old times of 32-colour palettes.

The GIF format has been smartly designed: for each frame in the animation, only the differences with the previous frame are saved so that compression can achieve better results.

The complete specification is available here; for some cool animation I took a subscription from Animation Factory.

If someone is interested, I can make the library available on this site. Until then, I wish everybody a Merry Christmas.

Generally, C++.

Anyway, we will occasionally talk about other programming languages and tools, as well as topics concerning software programming that are not related to a particular language.

So, why C++? Aren’t there more modern languages as Java or C# ?

I won’t report here the long-time debate between C++ and Java on features and performance; if you google around you’ll find that the internet is very rich of details.

In my opinion, it’s a matter of inclination. There is no best language ever, but probably there is one that fits your needs.

Java is easier than C++, has a huge library, is portable in the binary format and is well supported. It can be enough, but not for me. I’m a nice person but when it comes to work I turn to a meticulous person, something like this .

So I can’t work without optimizing the code, fine tuning performance and even spend hours in Purify-ing it when needed; I’d loose much of the fun.

So much time has passed since I last updated this site.
As you can see, I’ve turned my previous personal site into a blog. Anyway, I won’t write a lot about me here; this will be a technical blog where you can find what I like to do the most: software programming.

So, what have I been doing for such a long time?
It’s quite easy: working, working, working…

It’s not worth working hard if nobody knows what you are working on. So here we are.

For newbies, this is some exotic-software-developer’s site; please read about me and check out the download section.