Hi David,<br>I am also a student who is interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code working on TuxType. I learned programming about 8 years ago and I am member of a typing club (We are actually practicing typing) for 7 years by now. I am interested in your project, because I think it is very helpful and provides an excellent long-time motivation, because it is a kind of game everyone likes playing for at least some time every day. Some time ago, I programmed a typing tutor on my own, but I think it gets boring after some time, because it is just about typing texts and finger practices etc. Because of my time in the typing club, I have collected many typing exercises, mainly in German but also in English, which I would add to TuxType. I would also add words to the English, German and Spanish word lists.<br>
<br><div><span class="gmail_quote">2008/3/23, David Bruce <<a href="mailto:dbruce@tampabay.rr.com">dbruce@tampabay.rr.com</a>>:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi Kate,<br> <br> On Thursday 20 March 2008 12:48:51 pm Kate Scheppke wrote:<br> > To Mr. David Bruce,<br> ><br> > I am interested in contacting a prospective mentor about my<br> > application to work on the TuxType program this summer as a part of<br>
> the Google Summer of Code. I was referred to you by Bill Kendrick.<br> <br> Yes, I'm the one for anything related to tuxtype. I have been working on<br> tuxmath and tuxtype as a hobby activity for about three years - I'm a<br>
transplant surgeon in "real life", not a programmer. I did a fair amount of<br> CS as an undergrad before deciding to go to medical school, but it was a<br> while ago (on punch cards in a language called "AlgolW"). I taught myself C<br>
and C++ about ten years ago and have gradually gained experience through<br> free/open source projects.<br> <br> So - I do not have a degree in computer science, if that matters.<br> <br> ><br> > I'm most interested in working on TuxType2 because I really like<br>
> typing tutor software. I think it's a great tool for teaching typing,<br> > I've used a number of different typing tutor programs and have<br> > benefited immensely from them. The tasks on the projects page that I<br>
> am interested in working are the two tasks listed under "medium"<br> > difficulty<br> <br> > : rearranging the source tree<br> Actually, I should probably do that before anyone else starts hacking on<br>
tuxtype, because it is (ahem) kind of a mess. I'm planning to release a new<br> tar.gz in the next day or so with the most recently contributed themes and<br> some cosmetic enhancements, and then try to get the tree restructured.<br>
<br> > and in-game support for<br> > editing word lists and practice sentences.<br> <br> This would be a better project, as it would be more self-contained, and the<br> added functionality would be highly useful.<br>
<br> > Additionally, I am<br> > interested in looking into the possibility of having the program work<br> > with different keyboard layouts.<br> <br> Tuxtype works by looking at the "unicode" field of each SDL key event<br>
(event.key.keysym.unicode, to be precise). It doesn't know anything about<br> the user's keyboard layout (or locale) - it just listens for SDL key events,<br> and checks the unicode value to know what to do. One problem is that tuxtype<br>
has no way of knowing (from the OS) what characters can actually be typed, so<br> it is entirely possible to have words in the games that are impossible to<br> type. The "keyboard.lst" files for each theme address this, but it is<br>
error -prone. Unfortunately, the current SDL API does not provide a<br> cross-platform way to query the OS for this information, AFAIK. From what I<br> can tell, the "new" SDL (1.3, to be called 2.0 when released in stable form)<br>
will support this.</blockquote><div><br>I noticed this myself: The German keyboard layout doesn't support some characters like 'ü', 'ä' and 'ö'. I am also interested in adding an in-game support for editing word lists and implementing the auto-detection of typeable characters. Alternatively, I would also like to replace some of the "homebrew stuff" with GNU gettext, if this is needed more urgently than the other features.<br>
<br>I don't think changing to SDL 1.3 would be a good choice, because it is unstable, do you? And I don't know when SDL 2.0 will be released, I guess it might still take some time. Do you also think that adding this feature as another type of "homebrew stuff" would be reasonable? Actually, I think it is, because detecting the typeable characters seems quite specialized to me and I am not sure if it will ever be implemented into SDL. <br>
<br>Thank you,<br><br>Andreas Schütte<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> > Perhaps this functionality has<br> > already been implemented and I just wasn't able to figure it out when<br>
> I used the software or perhaps the software is designed so that this<br> > would be an unreasonably difficult summer project, if that is the case<br> > I am happy to focus on the two other tasks listed above.<br>
<br> Tuxtype in its current form is limited by its "reinvention of the wheel", with<br> its own home-brewed gettext and failure to take into account the user's<br> locale and keyboard setup. I'm not sure how readily this invasive stuff can<br>
be addressed in a summer project.<br> ><br> Thanks!<br> <br><br> <br> --<br> David Bruce<br> <br> _______________________________________________<br> Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev mailing list<br> <a href="mailto:Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev@lists.alioth.debian.org">Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev@lists.alioth.debian.org</a><br>
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