IE7 and Quite BASIC

Alright, I can see in the server logs that more and more people are switching to IE7 now. I am hopeful Quite BASIC does not suffer severly from the change. I have tested all the "house projects".

I had to change a color name in the "Wall" game from "lightGray" to "lightGrey" since the former wasn't supported in IE7 for some weird reason. But other than that all house projects seem to function properly in IE7.

IE7 has new security and privacy settings, and I have anecdotal reports that this may block the INPUT command which is used for example in the popular Trebuchet game. I have not reproduced this problem, but if you do experience it, please let me know so I can try to find a workaround or post proper instructions to change the privacy settings.

Strange Attractor

I just added a new math project, "The Henon Strange Attractor", to the house projects. This is the 6^th mathematics project and like most of them it is a short program of a few dozen lines.

The Henon map is a simple two dimensional discrete dynamical system that leads to fascinating mathematics. There is a pretty good starting point at Wikipedia for anyone looking to learn more about chaos theory and the Henon map.

Two new "house projects"

We have recently added two "house projects" on the Projects menu:

• Etchy-Sketchy by Chill -- this is a simple drawing program kind of like the classic Etch-a-Sketch^(TM) game.
• Bifurcations -- This is a math project that plots the bifurcation diagram of the logistic function. I remember doing this myself in high school age and getting really exciting about the rich complexity that comes out of such a simple formula. In that sense it is much like the Mandelbrot set.
  

blog.quitebasic.com

Yay! Blogger added a custom domain feature.

So from now on, this blog's home is: blog.quitebasic.com. The old URLs should redirect, so hopefully this will not be an inconvenience to anyone.

A new year and Quite BASIC turns two months

Happy New Year everyone!

Since the launch on November 1st, over 10,000 people have visited the site, and 2007 is going to be very interesting.

A few days ago Quite BASIC was featured in the German computer magazine PC Welt, and we have seen a lot of traffic to the site from Germany ever since. However, none of this early success in spreading the word mean much unless we get the word out to teachers. So I'll say it again: please tell any teachers you know about Quite BASIC!

If you are a teacher thinking about using Quite BASIC, feel free to contact me if you need any assistance!

You can reach me at: feedback@quitebasic.com.