Saturday, January 27, 2007

Crunchy 0.8 is out

Version 0.8 of Crunchy has been released. It is available at its new home on code.google.com.

Crunchy, the Interactive Python Tutorial Maker, is an application that
transforms an ordinary html-based Python tutorial into an interactive
session within a web browser. Currently, only Firefox is supported.
Crunchy is developed and tested on Windows XP and Ubuntu Dapper Drake,
but should work on any suitable windows or UNIX system.

Three major improvements have been made since version 0.7 had been released.

1. New editor

Instead of a simple html textarea, Crunchy now gives the option of
using a "real" editor, namely EditArea. EditArea support syntax coloring
and allows loading and saving local Python files among other features.
Within Crunchy, it is set up so that the tab key is translated into 4
spaces.

2. Language support

Crunchy now supports English and French, through the use of ".po"
files. When running Python code, some error messages have been
adapted/translated. EditArea itself support more languages
(currently: Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese,
Polish, Portuguese).

3. Graphical tutorial converter.

Crunchy uses some supplementary markup to transform html files into
interactive tutorials. Whereas previous versions required a tutorial
maker to edit an html file "by hand", version 0.8 includes a tutorial
editor: with a few clicks, you can easily add to an html file the
chosen interactive elements and options for Crunchy.

In addition to the above major improvements, the code has been
refactored significantly and a number of small bug fixes have been
made. Crunchy will be demonstrated at the upcoming Pycon 2007.

The next release will likely have a new, simplified API for tutorial writers, but with more powerful features, thanks to the work of Johannes Woolard. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be ready in time for Pycon. Anyone planning to go to Pycon, and who is interested in Crunchy should feel free to contact me with any questions/suggestions they may want to have me address during my presentation.

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