Donnerstag, 15. November 2012

Simon 0.4.0: Beta 1

It is November 15 and therefore time for our first beta release of Simon 0.4 (tagged as Simon 0.3.90).

Download the source tarball here: Simon 0.4.0: Beta 1

Please note that this release is purely for testing purposes and not meant to replace Simon 0.3.0 on production systems yet.

Don't forget to report bugs!

Dienstag, 13. November 2012

Simon in Brazil

Amidst all the release preparation it can be helpful to reflect why we're actually working on all of this.

Because of that, I want to share an email about a project of the Federal University of Pará, Brazil that I received just a couple of days ago:
The project began in January, 2012 with the goal of deploying SimonBR in public schools in Castanhal, a city located in the state of Pará, Brazil.
The idea is to enable students with physical disabilities to use the computer to perform basic tasks such as listening to music, view photos, access the Internet, email, etc.
And here is a demonstration video of what they have built:

 

Please help us test the next version of Simon and report any bugs that you find on our bug tracker to make sure that projects like that will become more common in the future!

Freitag, 2. November 2012

Winter is here

Yesterday was the official feature freeze of Simon 0.4 which means that after years of summer, winter has finally descended on trunk.

As is par for the course, a lot of last minute cramming ensued but I'm happy to report that all the major planned features have made it in. I'll try to blog about some of the most important ones a little bit leading up to the release.

The feature freeze also means that we are now concentrating on fixing bugs. And we need your help!
With software as complex as Simon, there are a lot of corner cases that are hard to find by us developers alone. Compiling Simon is easy, though, so please give it a go and report any bugs that you might will find to make Simon 0.4 as stable as it should be.

Finally, today is also our string freeze. While we're still busy hacking away at all those messages at the moment, starting at midnight, there will be no new strings barring any unforeseen circumstances.
If you can help translate Simon into another language and need help to get started, just get in touch with us. We really appreciate it!

Update: Unforseen circumstances  :). We'll sadly have to break the string frezeze one last time as a rather large change set (renaming simon -> Simon, etc.) was not ready in time. It's being commited right now, though.. Sorry for the inconvenience.