[Sugar-devel] Release 9.0 ... Finally.

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 11:53:57PM +0100, Bruno Coudoin wrote:
> After two years of work, the GCompris development team is happy to share
> with you the release of the version 9.0.
> 
> GCompris is almost 10 years old and it needed to make some deep code
> restructuring. This release brings many mandatory changes to make it
> easier to enhance, maintain and distribute GCompris.
> 
> The first major change has been driven by the Sugar community. On the XO
> there was a need to distribute the activities individually. Since the
> early days of GCompris, we had properly separated the core engine and
> the activities but the laters were shared in a single folder. Now each
> activity in GCompris have a single directory. This includes its code and
> its data (menu, icon, images, sounds, data set).
> 
> Beside allowing per activity distribution, it is also makes it easier to
> contribute to GCompris, there is even an activity called pythontemplate
> that can be used as a starting point to create your own.
> 
> The second major change has been to replace the old, unmaintained
> gnome-canvas toolkit by the more modern, Cairo based toolkit named
> goocanvas. This makes the rendering of GCompris much better, we now have
> an alpha channel and the antialiasing.
> 
> The third change is our skin format that is now fully SVG based and uses
> the elements IDs. This way creating a skin can be done by editing a
> single file instead of 70 files.
> 
> The last change is the image ratio (width versus height). In the old
> version we were using 800x600 (4/3) and could only do fullscreen by
> changing the screen resolution. Now, to accomodate newer monitors, we
> are using the 800x520 resolution which is wider. But GCompris playing
> area is not smaller because we managed to replace the big button bar to
> something more integrated. The full screen is done by rescaling ourself,
> you can even rescale GCompris in window mode.
> 
> A good side effect is that GCompris can be used on big monitor and on
> smaller devices.
> 
> Beside the major changes, there has been a lot of minor changes all
> around, it would take too many time to report these.
> 
> At least, I have to mention: 
> - The new graphism from Stephane Cabaraux for the canal lock and water
>   cycle activities. 
> - The new photo hunter activity by Marc Le Douarain 
> - More famous paintings by Marc Levivier.
> 
> To give an idea of the changes, you may want to look a an old and a new
> version of our clock activity:
> http://gcompris.net/IMG/jpg/old_clock.jpg
> http://gcompris.net/IMG/jpg/new_clock.jpg

Great news, /me has switched to preparing new activities for ASLO.

> 
> 
> -- 
> Bruno Coudoin
> http://gcompris.net  Free educational software for kids
> http://toulibre.org  Logiciel Libre à Toulouse
> http://april.org     Promouvoir et défendre le Logiciel Libre
> 
> 
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-- 
Aleksey