LucidLife is a program for investigating and playing with Conway's Life, a famous cellular automaton. Aimed at users of the GNOME desktop environment, LucidLife should also be portable to other platforms. LucidLife is based on GtkLife.
News
April 29th 2007: 0.9.2
Small bug fix release -- get it in the downloads section.
October 28th 2006: 0.9.1
Version 0.9.1 includes some minor bug fixes -- get it in the downloads section.
June 26th 2005: Debian packages
Miriam Ruiz has created some debian packages of lucidlife.
June 23rd 2005: Initial Release
This post marks the release of LucidLife 0.9[download]. LucidLife is a fork of GtkLife, intended to improve usability and provide a more seamless experience for users of modern desktop environments. In other words, it's a GTK+2 version of GtkLife with lots of other UI changes.
I hope to provide debian packages shortly.
Some changes from GtkLife:
- Switch from GTK+ 1.2 to GTK+ 2.
- Selection and drawing are now separate 'tools', with corresponding changes in the appearance of the mouse cursor. This makes selection discoverable. The old method of holding shift is still there.
- The mouse wheel now scrolls left and right when holding shift, and zooms in and out when holding control.
- A new 'tool' called grab allows the user to navigate the grid by dragging it around with the mouse, instead of having to use the scrollbars or keyboard.
- The preferences system is radically changed. The separate preferences for the current state vs. the default on startup are gone. Now it remembers everything at quit, and all settings come back as they were last time when one starts the program. I have done this in the interests of simplicity.
- The manual selection of help browser is gone in favour of using gnome-vfs to use the user's preferred browser.
- Now use autotools and intltool: translation into other locales should soon be possible.
- A .desktop file is now installed for automatic inclusion in the user's application menu.
Screenshot
The main window
Downloads
LucidLife is free software, made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Source tarball: lucidlife-0.9.2.tar.gz
LucidLife depends on GTK+ >= 2.6 and gnome-vfs.
A Zenwalk linux package is available. Thanks to George Vlahavas.
A Gentoo ebuild is available. Thanks to Martin Holzhauer.
The assistance of packagers and translators is most appreciated.
About Conway's Life
- An introduction
- The original 1970 Scientific American article
- Paul Callahan's Page of Conway's Life Miscellany
- Alan Hensel's Life Applet
Authors
LucidLife is maintained by John Spray (jcspray [a snail] icculus.org).
LucidLife is a derivative work of Suzanne Britton's GtkLife.
LucidLife is packaged with pattern collections by Alan Hensel and Jason Summers.