Continuing my December Adventure, I started the day by writing up yesterday’s dive into Psion manuals and the Organiser II Comms Link. I also added a couple of new items to my LZ6 Ideas program (aka ‘lucky dip’) to ensure they’re in the running for future adventuring:

• Series 7 emulation
• Write up Nezumi

With these additional entries in place, I rolled the metaphorical dice for the day’s task. This turned out to be ‘Software Index spelunking’—yet another wonderfully chill excursion, and something I’d been hoping would come up early in the month. My idea behind this entry was to allow myself an opportunity to simply enjoy exploring some of the software the Psion Software Index, perhaps even making the exercise a daily feature.

Software Index Spelunking

Since I had my Series 7 with me for yesterday’s write-up, I decided to try an EPOC32 program or two¹ and, with the Software Index built-into Reconnect, doing so was simply a matter of scrolling until something took my interest and clicking the ‘Install’ button.

Focusing on programs with color icons (as an indicator that they might have dedicated Series 7 support), I selected ‘Colors’ by vorbauer.com, which turned out to be a disappointingly unplayable game of Simon. While I can’t tell if it’s a function of my aging Series 7’s screen or not, tile flashes were barely visible and far too fast to discern, meaning I was unable to make it past the first sequence.

Despite feeling slightly robbed of an engaging game of Simon, I took some screenshots, wrote a brief description, and added it to the Software Index. Find it here.

I’m Feeling Lucky

With one program down, I decided to bring forward another task from the list to work on: the Software Index ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button. Inspired by Colin Hoad’s 2024 ‘Advent of Beeb’, I’ve been meaning to add this early-Google style button² for a little while. The idea is that it will encourage me (and others) to dive randomly into the library and, hopefully, discover new and exciting programs.

Since the Software Index home page already preloads the top-level program listing using JavaScirpt (for the lazy loading and filtering features), adding the button was simply a matter of selecting a random in-memory item from the list and navigating to it:

function selectRandomGroup() {
    const index = Math.floor(Math.random() * filteredGroups.length);
    const group = filteredGroups[index];
    window.location.href = "/programs/" + group.id;
}

/* ... */

luckyButton.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
    selectRandomGroup();
});

Happily, this also respects the current filter, which means you can limit results to EPOC16 or EPOC32 programs, and hopefully, to specific program categories in the future. You can see the full change on GitHub if you’re curious, and I encourage you to try it out (and maybe even contribute some screenshots and metadata).

Quality of Life Improvements

Energized by the surprising ease of adding the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button (and forgetting my plans to stick to just one thing a day), I decided to add one small quality of life improvement to the index: program versions are now sorted in reverse order, meaning the most recent version will always appear at the top of the page (see Zher0es for an example).