Changes

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. In the spirit of making Sugar and Sugar Activities readily appropriated and modified by the end user, I have been distracted of late writing code. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I have been working on a refactoring of Turtle Art in order to make it easier to extend by teachers—[[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-02-10|a long-standing goal]]. I have an ulterior motive as well: making Turtle Art (and other Activities) easier to maintain. Towards that effort, I have been reworking and streamling some of the library classes: specifically, the sprite module and the graphics generation module. The focus on these libraries is to address a typical problem I struggle with: localization. The Turtle Art graphics are assembled from a combination of precomposed artwork and strings that are translated as part of the localization process. A word or phrase that is short in one language might be long in another, e.g., 'left' in English and 'izquierda' in Spanish. Coming up with static graphics that can accommodate this degree of variation has been a challenge. The original Turtle Art graphics were bitmaps (GIF), which are not readily ammenable to manipulation. In an earlier refactoring, I converted the graphics to vectors (SVG), but I still have had to do a lot of hand-tuning of the artwork, saving the results in individual files for each language. In the case of Turtle Art, this has been unwieldy: thousands of files are involved. The solution I am exploring is the dynamic generation of the graphics, where I combine the use of SVG and Pango. I am hopeful that the end results will not only be easier to maintain, but will also enable more facile extensions to the base Activity. To test some of these ideas, I updated the [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4246 VisualMatch Activity] to use the new libraries. It not only allowed me to streamline the Activity itself, but it also made it much easier to add new play modes—adding Mayan took less than 30 minutes—and adding end-user editing—it was suddenly trivial to allow the users to modify the cards used in the word game. I'm close to pushing these changes into Turtle Art as well. Hopefully we will see more local forks of the code as the barriers to modification and maintanence are lowered.

1. In the spirit of making Sugar and Sugar Activities readily appropriated and modified by the end user, I have been distracted of late writing code. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I have been working on a refactoring of Turtle Art in order to make it easier to extend by teachers—[[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-02-10|a long-standing goal]]. I have an ulterior motive as well: making Turtle Art (and other Activities) easier to maintain. Towards that effort, I have been reworking and streamlining some of the library classes: specifically, the sprite module and the graphics generation module. The focus on these libraries is to address a typical problem I struggle with: localization. The Turtle Art graphics are assembled from a combination of pre-composed artwork and strings that are translated as part of the localization process. A word or phrase that is short in one language might be long in another, e.g., 'left' in English and 'izquierda' in Spanish. Coming up with static graphics that can accommodate this degree of variation has been a challenge. The original Turtle Art graphics were bitmaps (GIF), which are not readily amenable to manipulation. In an earlier refactoring, I converted the graphics to vectors (SVG), but I still have had to do a lot of hand-tuning of the artwork, saving the results in individual files for each language. In the case of Turtle Art, this has been unwieldy: thousands of files are involved. The solution I am exploring is the dynamic generation of the graphics, where I combine the use of SVG and Pango. I am hopeful that the end results will not only be easier to maintain, but will also enable more facile extensions to the base Activity. To test some of these ideas, I updated the [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4246 VisualMatch Activity] to use the new libraries. It not only allowed me to streamline the Activity itself, but it also made it much easier to add new play modes—adding Mayan took less than 30 minutes—and adding end-user editing—it was suddenly trivial to allow the users to modify the cards used in the word game. I'm close to pushing these changes into Turtle Art as well. Hopefully we will see more local forks of the code as the barriers to modification and maintenance are lowered.

2. Speaking of Turtle Art, there is a wonderful essay on the origins of the Logo turtle at [http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711].

2. Speaking of Turtle Art, there is a wonderful essay on the origins of the Logo turtle at [http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711].