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

[Andreas Schütte]

Hi David,
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.

2008/3/23, David Bruce <dbruce at tampabay.rr.com>:
>
> 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.


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.

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.

Thank you,

Andreas Schütte

> 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
>
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