Work on Jack Mordaunt

Plato desktop client

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A cross-platform desktop client for Plato’s games: a primary chat window and any number of independent game windows, on Windows, macOS and Linux. Built in Go with the Gio immediate-mode toolkit, and bound directly to the C and C++ libraries it needed: ANGLE for OpenGL ES, V8 for the game runtime, SQLite for state, libwebp for images. The product is discontinued; the architecture is the part worth describing.

Sprig

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sprig is a client for Arbor, a federated chat platform, written in Go with Gio and shipped to five platforms from one codebase. Its author has since put it on ice; the work below is from 2022.

The problem

Sprig stored every chat message as its own file. Linux tolerated that. Windows did not: reading thousands of small files at startup made the client take seconds to open, and the cost grew with every conversation.

icnsify

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Apple’s .icns format has one official tool, iconutil, which runs only on macOS, resists scripting, and wants a rigid folder of pre-sized PNGs. icnsify replaces it with one command that runs anywhere:

brew install jackmordaunt/tap/icnsify
icnsify -i logo.png -o Icon.icns

It takes a single image, produces every size the format wants, converts common formats on the way in, and pipes like a Unix tool. A small GUI previews an .icns on any operating system.