Rur-ple 1.0rc

Rur-ple 1.0 is finally out ... sort of. Actually, it's a Release Candidate version. For the next little while, any free time I'll have is going to be spent on preparing my Pycon presentation (and working on Crunchy as needed to improve it before Pycon 2007). Since I had three more localizations available (German, Turkish and Welsh) than there was on sourceforge, I decided that it was better to release early. In the meantime, someone is working on an Italian localization (and possible lessons translation) which should be included in the final 1.0 version.

Pycon 2007: it's Crunch time

Yesterday I got some good news from the Pycon organizers: my proposed talk entitled Easy creation of interactive tutorials has been accepted. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how Crunchy can be used to create interactive Python tutorials. I've been thinking about how to organize my talk for about two months now but have not written a line yet. One thing I can say for sure at this time: this is not going to be your typical PowerPoint-type presentation. My current plan is to use Firefox for the presentation: one tab will display a fake html-based Python tutorial, the second tab will make use of codetch so that I can edit the same tutorial "live", and the third tab will display the resulting interactive tutorial as processed by Crunchy.

Rur-ple: double the number of languages

While I haven't had time to do programming in the past few months, some Rur-ple users have been busy and submitted new material. The upcoming 1.0 release of Rur-ple will include 3 new languages [Turkish (including a translation of most lessons), German and Welsh] as well as previously included languages [English (with all lessons), French and Spanish].

Inspired by the user contributions, I spent a few hours today re-writing the localization code. To add a new language now only requires the following:

1. Adding one line in a Python file (translation.py), that specify the language and language code, as well as the name of the .po file.
   
2. Creating a .po file containing the string translations.
3. Creating an html file (rur.htm) used as a Welcome Page in that language.

The new version will also save the last language selected and will use it upon re-starting Rur-ple.