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255);" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">Hi David, et. al.,<br>
<br>
Evidently, this thing failed to send and I've had it sitting in drafts
for a week. D'oh! I'm glad to do what I can, if anyone else wants to
step up as well...I'd imagine having only one mentor won't fly for GSoC.
<br>
<br>
The GDC is March 5-9, so I won't have too many spare cycles to write up
ideas and such, unfortunately. I might be able to crank out a paragraph
or two :)<br>
<br>
IIRC, Tux4Kids participated in some nominal fashion last summer. Was
that a sort of off-the-record mini-SoC?<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Brendan<br>
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<font color="#9FA2A5"><span style="padding-left:6px">February 23, 2012
4:56 PM</span></font></div></div></div>
<div style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136); margin-left: 24px;
margin-right: 24px;" __pbrmquotes="true" class="__pbConvBody"><p>Hi
everyone,</p>
<p>Who is interested in mentoring for GSOC this year? The organization
application period opens Feb 27, and the deadline is Mar 9. If we are
going to participate, we need to get our mentors and our "ideas" page
lined up in the next few days.</p></div>
</blockquote>
Barring any sudden catastrophes, I should actually be around this summer
and glad to mentor.<br>
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<p>Sadly, I've generally had less and less time for Tux4kids over the
last couple of years. I can do the general admin stuff, but any GSOC
projects are going to need someone else to be the primary mentor. I
still can fill in on an ad hoc basis if someone goes on vacation or gets
sick.</p></div></blockquote>
Such is life. It boggles my mind whenever I think of everything you do
for the org. In your position, I'd have been burned out long ago. By my
reckoning, you'd warrant, on average, one delicious cake every other day
for extraordinary contribution. If only I could bake.<br>
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<p>As for ideas on the tuxmath/tuxtype side, a couple things stand out:<br>
1. Finally get tuxtype "ported" to use t4kcommon. Tuxtype development
has basically been on hold for a while waiting for this.<br></p></div></blockquote>
Guess I'll take this one. Has there been any recent survey of the
situation?<br>
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<p>
2. SDL 2.0 is finally out, and we should probably move to it. I'm not
sure this would be enough for an entire project.<br></p>
</div></blockquote>
Woah, when did this happen? Last I checked, 1.3 was still a distant
point on the horizon. Cool!<br>
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<p>
3. It would be great to finally get some releasable code from
tux4kids-admin.</p>
</div></blockquote>
Agreed. Are schools generally using the text-based admin tools of yore?
And/or their own ragtag config methods?<br>
<br>
How about the network game? I haven't gotten to play around with it, but
I would assume it could use some polish of its own?<br>
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<p>On a wider scale, I am increasingly convinced that it would be
worthwhile to have our project release some educational kids software
for smartphones and tablets. From a licensing standpoint, only Android
is fully and unequivocally compatible with the GPL. However, if we
write new apps from scratch we would be free to choose a different
license (it just has to be a Free Software/Open Source license). My
thought is that we could write some educational minigames in Java that
could be adapted to be Android app, Java applets, or Java webstart
applications while sharing most all the same code. I've been learning
Java and Android with this in mind, but I don't think I know it well
enough to be a proper mentor.</p></div></blockquote>
I'm comfortable with general Android dev, but games are a different
beast entirely. I'd fully support this kind of effort, though. Another
strong option to consider is some kind of HTML5/JavaScript based
platform because, generally, any given smart* or iDevice can (or will)
support it, not to mention old fogey computers, too. The caveat to that
is you might have to forfeit the ability to use fancy touch/gyro
input--however, I have heard of tools that can give you even that
through web programming. <br>
<br>
Either way, the high-level development all the cool kids are doing these
days make it so easy to get a working product down quickly and
painlessly, that I'd have zero qualms about losing the existing codebase
and starting from scratch. <br>
<br>
FWIW, I've finally gotten my hands on a shiny Apple computer, so our Mac
ports may (fingers crossed) finally get some TLC. <br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Brendan<br>
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<p>As always, I defer to the Tux Paint folks for all issues related to
them.</p>
<p>Any thoughts?</p>
<p>David Bruce</p><br>
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