[Cuis-dev] [Ann] First sketch of Cuis 6.1 release - Please REVIEW and TEST!

[Juan Vuletich]

Hi Gerald,

I wish you and everyone in our community a great 2024!
(inline)

On 12/30/2023 12:03 PM, Gerald Klix via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Hi Juan,
>
> sorry for the long delay, I caught a rather nasty cold.
>
> First and most important:
> *Thank your for your work!*

You're most welcome!

> Second and less important:
> Haver's image saving problems are gone with Cuis Version 6.2 and 6.3.
> There are some minor issues like
>
>     * a different order of menu items in the preference menu (trivial
>       to fix)
>     * font loading, the TrueTypeFonts directory is not found in my
>       setup (easy to fix)
>
>
> For the remainder, please see my inline comments.
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Gerald

Yeah. As usual, some minor bumps may happen. Of course, keep reporting 
serious trouble or annoyances!

> ...
> IC, to describe the situation in German: „Einen Tod muß man sterben.“, 
> meaning you have to choose one evil.
>
> I can only think of one – rather nifty – improvement:
> Add two preference menu options like:
>
> 'Save preferences globally'
> This one selects the currently implemented behavior.
>
> 'Save preferences only in image'
> This one implements the old behavior.
>
> Both will be persisted in UsersPrefs.txt. The later
> serves as a flag, that means: Ignore every other setting in 
> UserPrefs.txt and
> stick to the settings that are already persistent in the image.

I did something very much like that. Thanks for the suggestion!
Check the updated Preferences menu.

> ....
>>
>> It also means to try to give a platform agnostic experience. For 
>> instance, right now, I'm doing a kind of introductory curse to CS for 
>> my daughters and a few friends (teenagers and young adults). I 
>> prepared a bunch of thumbdrives with this very Cuis setup. They bring 
>> a mix of Windows, Intel and ARM Mac, and Linux laptops. This works on 
>> all of them without needing to waste their attention on irrelevant 
>> technicalities. I like that, and I think it reflects the kind of 
>> experience most novices will have.
> Nice, I tried such a thing for two of my daughters individually and 
> two of my sons.
> I failed miserably.
> I hope you are better at teaching, than I am!

I'm don't think I'm much at a teacher, but I'm trying!

I'm calling this "Computadoras y Números" (Computers and Numbers). I'm 
trying to help them develop some algorithm thinking, and understand how 
computers deal with numbers and how we can get them to compute useful 
stuff. Even though we are using Cuis, I didn't even bother to explain 
Smalltalk syntax, just jumping into "the stuff".

For the first session, I wanted them to compute the square root of an 
integer number. We talked for some minutes about what does that mean, 
and how that could be computed. Then I let them try it, and help them as 
they move along. The next exercise was to use the trick that adding 
consecutive odd numbers yield perfect squares, and compare both methods. 
It went OK, but it was a bit too hard for them.

For the second session I wanted to play with real numbers, so we tried 
two ways of computing Pi. The first one was to "draw" a circle on a 
grid, and take the number of points in the grid that lie inside the 
circle (using the x^2+y^2 <= r formula), divide that by the total number 
of points. And do that for increasingly larger grids, to improve the 
approximation. This one is interesting because it only uses integers. 
But it is slow. Then we tried another method, that is the perimeter of 
an inscribed polygon of increasing number of sides. This later one can 
be done without trigonometry, but it requires sqrt() to normalize the 
vertexes, hence Float. These are way more complicated things that what 
we did before, so I went slower, and explained my solution on my 
computer as I guided them on writing their own. So I didn't push them 
too much and they didn't get frustrated. I guess the ability to write 
the solution completely on their own requires a bit more time and 
practice, and my objective is to engage them, not scare them. They still 
could really understand what we were doing, and appreciate the kind of 
thinking involved.

It was a lot of what Alan calls "hard fun". I'm looking forward for our 
next session!



> ... Suppose you want to write a maintenance application
> for images – something I am contemplating for years – a straight
> forward solution is to use directories in the filesystem to structure
> a given set of tuples of image and change files. The current solution
> forces the maintenance application to copy (or symlink)
> UnicodeData.txt  and the file with the compressed sources.
>
> How about an 'image (related) data directory', that
> contains all that stuff? There should be command line options similar
> to those implemented for the userBaseDirectory.
>
> The TrueTypeFonts directory seems to be already relative to the 
> userBaseDirectory,
> which is, IHMO, is the best solution.

We could use a preference for the directory containing sources and 
UnicodeData.txt. Or we could store them in the #vmPath. Or just keep 
them in the same directory as the image. I really don't see much of a 
problem.

Cheers,

-- 
Juan Vuletich
cuis.st
github.com/jvuletich
researchgate.net/profile/Juan-Vuletich
independent.academia.edu/JuanVuletich
patents.justia.com/inventor/juan-manuel-vuletich
linkedin.com/in/juan-vuletich-75611b3
twitter.com/JuanVuletich

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