Hi,
To elaborate on it more, here's the current standing with some of
the program suggestions:
* Audio editors: Impossible; not just because of lack of SDK, but
audio files eat a lot of memory (especially wav files) and
editing them is like copying and pasting a thick book (at least
"thick" electronic books of thousands of pages, as audio chunks
are several megabytes in size). There's also an issue with
compressing and decompressing audio files (especially between wav
and mp3, which was one of the most frequently requested file
format for recording). Think about how long it takes to open a
two megabyte BRF file using
Book Reader - multiply this by tens would be a lot of waiting
time and unacceptable for some. Also, with varying file formats
out there, and especially if you need to work with compressed
file types such as mp3 adds to complexity of this feature, as
KeySoft needs to "understand" how file types work i.e. a lot of
libraries (DLL's) that it needs to use, therefore increasing
memory consumption. And suppose if you were playing an audio
file and converting one at the same time - even I don't want to
think about how BrailleNote would scream for breath.
* Hangman: I had that game as my plan. Essentially, to write
Hangman game, we (programmers) need to tackle two or three
problems: storing a lot of words (could be hundreds of them),
choosing the word in a way that would appear "random" (there's no
way of truly coming up with random numbers using computers) and
validating user entered character against the selected word.
Well, storing a bunch of words is quite easy, the downside being
that, as more and more words are stored, this game (program)
would use more and more memory. Choosing a random word from this
word set requires some thinking, because obviously users don't
want to see same words each time it is played. Checking to see
if the character you entered is in the word is quite an easy, but
then you may be thinking that you just want the first occurence
of that character in the word. Piece them together and we have a
"working" game - well, it works because it runs fine; what's
missing are "mouth" and "eyes" i.e. ways it can present itself
to the BrailleNote user (via braille or speech) and getting input
from the user via keyboard (and this is one of the components of
the SDK; the others could be other hardware that BN has and
documentations on how to use them). Then you'll be thinking, "I
found this Hangman game that runs on my Windows computer. Can
this be run on the BN?" No, because of underlying hardware
differences between a PC and a BrailleNote. Then you'd be asking
yourself, "how about a Hangman game that is advertised to run on
Windows Mobile devices. Could this work?" No, this time because
there's no way for the program to tell you whether you guessed
right or you telling the game to look up the selected word in
dictionary. As for the rest of this story, I'd like you (the
users) to ponder for a while.
* Math: Again, same story as Hangman: if I can, I'd be happy to
write sort of a math game that'll run as a console program for
your PC, but not for a BrailleNote. Or, if JS programmers would
like to try, I'd be happy to give a C++ implementation and
possible algorithm of that program (if interested). But,
personally, I think its better to master the material without a
computer first before checking your work with some games to allow
you to think about these concepts when working with applications
(how can you solve a modeling problem without knowing calculus at
heart?).
* Document conversion: We have an implementation of such
(actually, two): non-native KeySoft files to KeySoft file
conversion and vice versa, and a way of extracting text from PDF
(the latter is more towards extractor than a converter); and
you're correct: the second tool requires KeySoft 9.2 or later.
Hypothetically (and I say hypothetically because I could be
wrong), a procedure to convert from one document to another is
let the source document be read by a conversion program, then
according to some rules that the program understands, transform
it into the target document. Or, the conversion
program could generate an intermediate file, from which the
converter itself or another program could translate it into the
target format. We immediately run into a wall: with a number of
file formats out there, how can we tell this conversion program
to treat these file formats efficiently (with little to no errors
and with text and markup preserved)? Well, a fairly useful
solution could be for this converter to come with a number of
routines that checks the file format of the source document, then
call another guy (a library) to do the conversion and have this
library return the converted file to the conversion program. Or,
it could ask this external library to convert the source document
into something that the converter would process itself, then the
converter would take this intermediate file and translate it into
another format (by itself or calling another library specializing
in this task and knows the
format of the target file. Then we need to think about program
speed and how much memory it'll eat, because it affects wait
times between submitting the source file for conversion and
getting the target document. And memory plays 1not important
part here mostly due to size of the document and complexity of
the file format involved, especially if an offline version is
produced, which is significantly slower than online version
(well, this statement depends on file size and kinds of files the
conversion supports).
Sorry for all the techie rants here - and I'm sure this is
something that all as us could ponder for a while: that
BrailleNote is complicated yet simple machine.
Cheers,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: Alex Hall <[email protected]
To: Gisela <[email protected]
Date sent: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 12:32:04 -0500
Subject: Re: [Braillenote] For Programmers.
The audio editing programs are, unfortunately, impossible right
now.
With an sdk it might be doable, but even then it would require
the
keysoft programmers to understand how audio editing works, which
could
be quite difficult.
The other programs could be possible, especially the math one.
If
someone takes this on (such as Joseph or Marvin), let me know,
otherwise I will look into it.
On 2/2/12, Gisela <[email protected]> wrote:
That would rock!
----- Original Message -----
From: jessica <[email protected]
To: bn <[email protected]
Date sent: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:22:08 -0800
Subject: [Braillenote] For Programmers.
Hi. This is for Programmers and people who know javascript.
There
are some programs that I want for my bn either as keysoft
extensions or as webpages. I am wondering if anyone knows if
these programs exist and if they do then where can I get them?
If
they do not exist then would it be possible for someone on this
list to make them? I want to be able to convert back and forth
between wav, mp3 and m4a. I also want to be able to change the
bitrate and frequency and have a normalise audio option like on
the site online-convert.com has. I want to be able to convert
files without needing an internet connection. I also want to
have
a program that would let me split one audio file in to more then
one or merge 2 or more files in to one. I would like to be able
to do it without an internet connection but if anyone knows of a
site that would work with the bn that would be ok to. I am also
looking for games like hang man and x and o. I am thinking
because the bn does not have a screen, you could describe the x
and o board as the top left being 1 the top middle being 2 the
top right being 3 the middle left being 4 the middle middle
being
5 the middle right being 6 and the bottom left being 7 the
bottom
middle being 8 and the bottom right being 9. Also, my math
skills
are not very good and I would like to brush up on them but I do
not have anyone who can ask me questions so that I can try to
guess the answers and learn. Therefore, I want a program that
would ask me basic times, divide, plus and minus questions that
I
could change the settings to make it harder or easier. For
example I could give it minimum and maximum numbers to use for
the plus and minus like minimum 1 maximum 50 or minimum 51 and
maximum 100. For the timesing, I could tell it to go from 1
times
12 to 12 times 12 or set it to give me more or less numbers.
For
example from 1 times 10 to 10 times 10. Or say, from 6 times 12
to 12 times 12. And then up to even higher numbers for once I
got
better. I do not know how any of this works. It might be
easier
to put the timesing, dividing, plussing and minussing in 4
separate programs instead of trying to get it all in one. If it
is all in 1 then I want to be able to set it to either give me
all 4 types of questions or to just give me some types using
check boxes. Also, a similar thing but for spelling words. If
anyone has any ideas or wants any of this explained farther can
you please let me know? Thank you!
sent from my BrailleNote
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--
Have a great day,
Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
[email protected]; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap
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