News
Sam the Helper Hero (Programmer Personas)
This past week, Eric and I have been designing and starting to implement the code framework for WeSay. I have rarely had a chance to do this kind of “green fields” architecture before, but I have done it enough to recognize some of the dangers, such as those described by… Read More
Today we broke ground on “the real thing”. All of the prototype code has been put away (still in the code repository, of course) and we are starting from scratch. The prototype has served us well, helping us to answer many questions. As a last hurrah for the app, Andy… Read More
I’ve updated our mockups here, based on the work that Berm, Eric and I did last week. They are not 100% faithful to what we are actually planning, especially on the OLPC version (where we won’t be spending precious screen space on tab bars, for… Read More
Wednesday we said goodbye to the last of our guests who flew over to discuss collaborating on applications for language development on low-power computers. Everyone seems to have had a good time, or at least have a lot of good Thai meals. Berm not only to time off from his… Read More
After two discouraging days of trying to get Mono to work on the OLPC image, I have finally figured out why I was up against such a brick wall. The first problem I had was that the Mono installer for… Read More
Besides buying paint for the office (which we fear may now end up looking like a coffee house), I drew up some mockups of a configuration application, here. top… Read More
Thanks to Martin, I finally was able to get pango to use the Graphite engine. I had to install the debs that he gave me (as far as I know they haven’t made it to a universe repository yet). My… Read More
Today’s main task was to get FieldWorks Language Explorer to build on my machine, so that I can work on adding the ability for users to import and export the forth-coming xml dictionary interchange format files. We need this to make it really easy to exchange FW… Read More
One of the things that’s been bugging us for the past couple weeks has been performance. Sure it’s fast on our machines but what about our target machine. There is quite a difference there. So I was finally able to get a Linux distribution (… Read More
WeSay: Words Prototype Results, Part I
These have been an exciting last few days, as our prototype has got to the place where we can start getting some questions answered. Happily, our quick tests (just looking at the Windows Task Manager), show that we can load the prototype with a 32k-word Thai glossary in just… Read More