[Sugar-devel] [Release] Turtle Blocks V106

[Walter Bender]

This version of Turtle Blocks has some new features that may be of
interest to developers. Raul got collaboration working between GNOME
and Sugar. It is still in an experimental stage, but it looks quite
promising. Also, with this version, I have incorporated a plugin model
that will, in theory, make it easier to add support for new devices --
WeDo, Arduino, NXT, GoGo, etc. -- to the basic Turtle Blocks package.
There are currently three components that use the plugin model: audio
sensors on the XO hardware; camera support; and RFID tag reading.
There is still a bit more internal refactoring I'll be doing to
further the isolation between plugins and the base code -- feedback on
the current implementation would be appreciated. Finally, Raul is
finishing up a new RPM for Turtle Blocks that fixes a lot of problems
with previous efforts to distribute the code outside of Sugar.

== Source ==

http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/TurtleArt/TurtleArt-106.tar.bz2

== News ==

ENHANCEMENTS

* Added sharing to draw_text, fill_polygon, draw_pixbuf (#2461)
* Added sharing (EXPERIMENTAL) between Gnome and Sugar versions (with Raul
  Gutierrez Segales)
* Added 'time' block for measuring elapsed time (in seconds)
* Added 'brightness' block for reading average camera luminance value
  (with help from Tony Forster and Guzman Trinidad)
* Added camera media block for grabbing images from the camera
* New speak.py sample code for doing text to speech (Tony Forster)
* New load_block.py sample code for programatically creating TA projects
* New psuedo-color.ta example (Tony Forster)
* New love-speaks-volumes.ta example -- use mic input to scale shapes
* New spiralaterals.ta example inspired by Spiralaterals activity
* Added a Media Palette for all media-related blocks and reorganized palettes
  (#2633) for more clarity (Claudia Urrea and Bill Kerr)
* Added offset for second argument in Boolean compare blocks
* More complete translations in Spanish (es) and Italian (it)
* Added plugin support for non-standard devices (camera, sensors, RFID)

BUG FIXES

* Exposed see as an external method (#2542)
* Media type tests on file suffix use lower()
* Added support for localization to GNOME version (Raul Gutierrez Segales)
* Work around for situations where gst is not available
* Fixed problem with displaying Journal preview images in portfolio
* Restore overlay grids on clear
* Fixed problem with help-string wrap width (#2633)
* Added missing dependency to RFID plugin (Emiliano Pastorino)

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org