[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Google Summer of Code student seeks mentor

[David Bruce]

Hi Kate,

On Thursday 20 March 2008 12:48:51 pm Kate Scheppke wrote:
> To Mr. David Bruce,
>
> I am interested in contacting a prospective mentor about my
> application to work on the TuxType program this summer as a part of
> the Google Summer of Code.  I was referred to you by Bill Kendrick.

Yes, I'm the one for anything related to tuxtype.  I have been working on 
tuxmath and tuxtype as a hobby activity for about three years - I'm a 
transplant surgeon in "real life", not a programmer.  I did a fair amount of 
CS as an undergrad before deciding to go to medical school, but it was a 
while ago (on punch cards in a language called "AlgolW").  I taught myself C 
and C++ about ten years ago and have gradually gained experience through 
free/open source projects.

So - I do not have a degree in computer science, if that matters.

>
> I'm most interested in working on TuxType2 because I really like
> typing tutor software.  I think it's a great tool for teaching typing,
> I've used a number of different typing tutor programs and have
> benefited immensely from them.  The tasks on the projects page that I
> am interested in working are the two tasks listed under "medium"
> difficulty

> : rearranging the source tree
Actually, I should probably do that before anyone else starts hacking on 
tuxtype, because it is (ahem) kind of a mess.  I'm planning to release a new 
tar.gz in the next day or so with the most recently contributed themes and 
some cosmetic enhancements, and then try to get the tree restructured.

> and in-game support for  
> editing word lists and practice sentences.

This would be a better project, as it would be more self-contained, and the 
added functionality would be highly useful. 

> Additionally, I am 
> interested in looking into the possibility of having the program work
> with different keyboard layouts.  

Tuxtype works by looking at the "unicode" field of each SDL key event 
(event.key.keysym.unicode, to be precise).  It doesn't know anything about 
the user's keyboard layout (or locale) - it just listens for SDL key events, 
and checks the unicode value to know what to do.  One problem is that tuxtype 
has no way of knowing (from the OS) what characters can actually be typed, so 
it is entirely possible to have words in the games that are impossible to 
type.  The "keyboard.lst" files for each theme address this, but it is 
error -prone.  Unfortunately, the current SDL API does not provide a 
cross-platform way to query the OS for this information, AFAIK.  From what I 
can tell, the "new" SDL (1.3, to be called 2.0 when released in stable form) 
will support this.

> Perhaps this functionality has 
> already been implemented and I just wasn't able to figure it out when
> I used the software or perhaps the software is designed so that this
> would be an unreasonably difficult summer project, if that is the case
> I am happy to focus on the two other tasks listed above.

Tuxtype in its current form is limited by its "reinvention of the wheel", with 
its own home-brewed gettext and failure to take into account the user's 
locale and keyboard setup.  I'm not sure how readily this invasive stuff can 
be addressed in a summer project.
>
Thanks!


-- 
David Bruce