[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Some issues that I see with 1.8.0

[David Bruce]

Hi Matt,

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Matthew McSpadden
<webmaster at anvilsmithtech.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
> Just wanted to run by you guys some things that I noticed when testing and
> setting up tuxtype on our computer lab here at school.
>
> 1. When you hover over the icon it says run Tuxtype 2, it's not a big deal,
> I think it is just left over from previous things.

Yes, it is just left over.  In fact I fixed that on one of my
computers, but I don't think I committed it to svn before I built the
new packages, so it should be gone with the next build.

> 2. My first problem with tuxtype 1.8.0 is the new words lists. And i'd like
> to share how I fixed it in my case. Let me say that I LOVE this feature and
> am looking forward to using it. It would allow the students to come in with
> their spelling words, make a list and then play games to practice them. The
> problem that I ran into is that we are using a domain. Which means the
> students are all on limited accounts so that they can't mess up the
> computers too badly. But this also means that they do not have permissions
> to create new lists. I got around this by giving them all permissions to the
> tuxtype folder in program files, but it seems to me that if we are going to
> offer this custom lists thing, that it aught to be stored in the users
> application data folder, rather than in program files.

Sure, that would be great.  I personally don't have much of a sense of
how permissions are intended to be used in the Windows world.  Most of
the Windows machines I come in contact with have C:\Program Files
writeable by everyone.  TuxMath has some code (taken from TuxPaint a
couple years back, IIRC) to find the user's application data folder,
which could be adapted to TuxType.

> 3. Long words.... particularly anything over about 10 letters.

Until this release, the max word length was 8 characters.  Anything
over that in the word lists just got rejected by the function that
loads the word lists into memory for both the fish and comet games.

I changed it so the long words get loaded up to a longer maximum size
(20 chars), and the fish game now decides which words will fit
calculated from screen size.  In fullscreen, 20 letter words fit
easily.  The max for the comet game is still 8.

The word list editor also imposes a limit of 20 when the words are
saved, which is not the case with the bundled word lists created
outside of tuxtype.  Anyway, I'll look into these things.

I'm quite aware that the word list editor is in a sort of beta state.
It needs to scale better when resized into a window, the font is too
small, and some of the operations are a little counter-intuitive.  But
it is a nice step in the right direction from Sarah.

> I love the new backgrounds and new music, overall seems to be a really nice
> setup. I like the update, please keep doing what you guys do.

Caroline deserves the credit for the new media files, and Matthew Trey
contributed all the new xml lesson files, IIRC.

Cheers,

David