Re: [IAEP] Adding a word-count to write
Hi Gary, Nice screen shot! The toolbars look very easy to understand and easy use to me. Unfortunately I can't really give much of a critique because it's hard for me to think like a primary-school child now :-) Plus I've seen some kids absolutely fly through learning how to use a computer so even AbiWord's full on gui is accessible rather quickly anyway. Just to let you know, one new feature in AbiWord-2.8 we really should expose to Write are annotations. These will be very useful for teachers to comment and correct submitted work from children. Giving full control over annotations within the context of Write's simplified toolbar will be a challenge and it would be great to get feedback on exactly which parts of an an annotation feature should be provided. Cheers! Martin On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Martin, On 18 Jul 2009, at 22:58, Martin Sevior wrote: We do not expose the underlying code to extract the numeric value of the word count from a document at present. It would trivial to add that to the API if there was consensus this would be a useful thing to do. Now is a good time to put in such requests because we're just finishing off the 2.8 release. However you can pop up the AbiWord modeless Word Count dialog by doing: self._abiword_canvas.invoke_cmd(dlgWordCount,,0,0) Thanks. Just added this as a toolbar button to test. For those interested, here's what it looks like in Sugar. With Sugars fullscreen interface design, the use of dialogues is rather finicky as it's easy to loose the dialogue behind to the desktop background layer: This will give you document statistics as you type. I can imagine that having the word count auto-updating in the toolbar would be a neat little feature for the Write 0.86. It might one of those high ceiling features for users to discover. One might also think of find, replace and goto all being implemented in the toolbar. FWIW, find is available under the Edit tab (but no replace functionality), and goto (page) is available on the View tab (but not goto line number). We have to careful to remember our target audience though. +1 I think it took some strong restraint to keep the number of features exposed down to what we see today in Write :-) If you have the time – I've been looking for feedback on a new Toolbar design that may be arriving in some form for Sugar 0.86. Some of the goals are to show the Stop activity button at all times (kids often get lost in the text tabs); resolve the difficulty of small click targets caused by the narrow height text tabs; use icons rather than relying on text tab names (lower age, and improved non-illiterate access): http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars#Top_level_Activity_toolbar_for_Write The mock-ups specifically keep the current Write functionality and tool groupings so it can be more easily compared with the current Write implementation. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adding a word-count to write
On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Martin, On 18 Jul 2009, at 22:58, Martin Sevior wrote: We do not expose the underlying code to extract the numeric value of the word count from a document at present. It would trivial to add that to the API if there was consensus this would be a useful thing to do. Now is a good time to put in such requests because we're just finishing off the 2.8 release. However you can pop up the AbiWord modeless Word Count dialog by doing: self._abiword_canvas.invoke_cmd(dlgWordCount,,0,0) Thanks. Just added this as a toolbar button to test. For those interested, here's what it looks like in Sugar. With Sugars fullscreen interface design, the use of dialogues is rather finicky as it's easy to loose the dialogue behind to the desktop background layer: This will give you document statistics as you type. I can imagine that having the word count auto-updating in the toolbar would be a neat little feature for the Write 0.86. It might one of those high ceiling features for users to discover. One might also think of find, replace and goto all being implemented in the toolbar. FWIW, find is available under the Edit tab (but no replace functionality), and goto (page) is available on the View tab (but not goto line number). We have to careful to remember our target audience though. +1 I think it took some strong restraint to keep the number of features exposed down to what we see today in Write :-) +1 I'm not sure this is a feature that many kids will need. However, if teacher/child feedback indicates it would be a nice addition, I'd recommend displaying these statistics within a palette. There could be a statistics button that, when hovered or clicked revealed a palette containing whatever pieces of info are worth exposing. I'm not sure what tab/toolbar that button would fit best within, though... Eben If you have the time – I've been looking for feedback on a new Toolbar design that may be arriving in some form for Sugar 0.86. Some of the goals are to show the Stop activity button at all times (kids often get lost in the text tabs); resolve the difficulty of small click targets caused by the narrow height text tabs; use icons rather than relying on text tab names (lower age, and improved non-illiterate access): http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars#Top_level_Activity_toolbar_for_Write The mock-ups specifically keep the current Write functionality and tool groupings so it can be more easily compared with the current Write implementation. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adding a word-count to write
Thanks Martin, On 19 Jul 2009, at 10:30, Martin Sevior wrote: Nice screen shot! The toolbars look very easy to understand and easy use to me. Unfortunately I can't really give much of a critique because it's hard for me to think like a primary-school child now :-) A fair and most valid answer :-) I hope to make a working version of the TurtleArt Activity using the same design style, as Walter and Caroline are currently using TA to teach in a school pilot over the summer. They can likely get some first hand impressions from our real audience. Now I'd rather have had more feedback before I commit my time to the work, but no one has screamed blue murder about the proposed change yet so perhaps it's time... Plus I've seen some kids absolutely fly through learning how to use a computer so even AbiWord's full on gui is accessible rather quickly anyway. :-) Just to let you know, one new feature in AbiWord-2.8 we really should expose to Write are annotations. These will be very useful for teachers to comment and correct submitted work from children. Giving full control over annotations within the context of Write's simplified toolbar will be a challenge and it would be great to get feedback on exactly which parts of an an annotation feature should be provided. I managed to find: http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Annotations ...but no screen-shots or mock-ups of the feature set. Do you know if there are any available yet? Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adding a word-count to write
HI Gary, I'll put together a screen cast of the AbiWord linux build showing all the features Real Soon Now. If you have access to a windows machine you can just download our abiword-2.7.7 binary from: http://www.abisource.com/downloads/abiword/2.7.7/Windows/abiword-setup-2.7.7.exe Unfortunately 2.7.7 is missing one last feature, a popup of the annotation content on mouse over. Unfortunately our Windows devs have not found the time to finish the implementarion of that but I hope it is obvious how it works from the screencast. Cheers Martin Giving full control over annotations within the context of Write's simplified toolbar will be a challenge and it would be great to get feedback on exactly which parts of an an annotation feature should be provided. I managed to find: http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Annotations ...but no screen-shots or mock-ups of the feature set. Do you know if there are any available yet? Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adding a word-count to write
HI Christoph, We do not expose the underlying code to extract the numeric value of the word count from a document at present. It would trivial to add that to the API if there was consensus this would be a useful thing to do. Now is a good time to put in such requests because we're just finishing off the 2.8 release. However you can pop up the AbiWord modeless Word Count dialog by doing: self._abiword_canvas.invoke_cmd(dlgWordCount,,0,0) This will give you document statistics as you type. I can imagine that having the word count auto-updating in the toolbar would be a neat little feature for the Write 0.86. It might one of those high ceiling features for users to discover. One might also think of find, replace and goto all being implemented in the toolbar. We have to careful to remember our target audience though. Cheers Martin On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Christoph Derndorfere0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: Hi all, while using Write today to draft up some articles for olpcnews I realized that I was missing a word count feature. Given that a lot of schools have very specific word count goals for homeworks, essays and assignments I'm thinking that this could be a useful feature to implement in time for the 0.86 release. What does everyone think about this? Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, olpcnews url: www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
