Uutiset

Today we are releasing GCompris version 4.2.

It contains bug fixes and graphics improvements on multiple activities.

This version adds translation for Latvian.

It is fully translated in the following languages:

• arabia
• bulgaria
• bretoni
• katalaani
• katalaani (Valencia)
• kreikka
• brittienglanti
• Esperanto
• espanja
• baski
• ranska
• galicia
• kroatia
• unkari
• indonesia
• italia
• liettua
• latvia
• malajalam
• hollanti
• Norjan nynorsk
• puola
• brasilianportugali
• romania
• venäjä
• sloveeni
• albania
• ruotsi
• Swahili
• turkki
• ukraina

It is also partially translated in the following languages:

• azeri (97%)
• valkovenäjä (87%)
• tšekki (97%)
• saksa (96%)
• viro (96%)
• suomi (95%)
• heprea (96%)
• makedonia (90%)
• portugali (96%)
• slovakki (84%)
• kiina (perinteinen) (96%)

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 4.1.

It contains bug fixes and graphics improvements on multiple activities.

It is fully translated in the following languages:

• arabia
• bulgaria
• bretoni
• katalaani
• katalaani (Valencia)
• kreikka
• espanja
• baski
• ranska
• galicia
• kroatia
• unkari
• italia
• liettua
• malajalam
• hollanti
• Norjan nynorsk
• puola
• brasilianportugali
• romania
• venäjä
• sloveeni
• ruotsi
• turkki
• ukraina

It is also partially translated in the following languages:

• azeri (97%)
• valkovenäjä (86%)
• tšekki (95%)
• saksa (95%)
• brittienglanti (95%)
• Esperanto (99%)
• viro (95%)
• suomi (94%)
• heprea (95%)
• indonesia (99%)
• makedonia (90%)
• portugali (95%)
• slovakki (83%)
• albania (99%)
• Swahili (99%)
• kiina (perinteinen) (95%)

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 4.0.

This version adds translations for 3 more languages: Bulgarian, Galician and Swahili.

It contains 190 activities, including 8 new ones:

• "Grammar classes" is an activity to learn to identify words grammatical classes, one class at a time.
• "Grammar analysis" is similar to the previous one, but with several classes requested for each sentence.
• "Calcudoku" is an arithmetic game where the goal is to fill a grid with numbers according to specific rules.
• With "Guess 24", using the 4 given numbers and the operators, find the number 24!
• In "Frieze", reproduce and complete the different friezes.
• "Read a graduated line" is an activity where you need to find a value represented on a graduated line.
• In "Use a graduated line", place the given value on the graduated line.
• In "Adjacent numbers", learn which numbers come before or after the given sequence.

It contains bug fixes and graphics improvements on multiple activities.

One major milestone has been reached with this version: after almost 9 years of work, the task of reworking all the graphics to fit the guidelines has been completed!

It is fully translated in the following languages:

• arabia
• bulgaria
• bretoni
• katalaani
• katalaani (Valencia)
• kreikka
• espanja
• baski
• ranska
• galicia
• kroatia
• unkari
• italia
• liettua
• malajalam
• hollanti
• puola
• brasilianportugali
• romania
• sloveeni
• turkki
• ukraina

It is also partially translated in the following languages:

• azeri (97%)
• valkovenäjä (86%)
• tšekki (94%)
• saksa (95%)
• brittienglanti (95%)
• Esperanto (99%)
• viro (95%)
• suomi (94%)
• heprea (95%)
• indonesia (95%)
• makedonia (90%)
• Norjan nynorsk (95%)
• portugali (95%)
• venäjä (95%)
• slovakki (83%)
• albania (99%)
• ruotsi (95%)
• Swahili (99%)
• kiina (perinteinen) (95%)

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 3.3.

This version adds translations for 2 more languages: Arabic and Esperanto.

It contains bug fixes on multiple activities such as "Path encoding", "Letter in word", "Ballcatch" and "Piano composition".

Some improvements of keyboard handling (shortcuts, focus...) have been done on several activities.

It also contains new graphics and improvements on "Photo hunter".

It is fully translated in the following languages:

• arabia
• azeri
• bretoni
• katalaani
• katalaani (Valencia)
• kreikka
• brittienglanti
• espanja
• baski
• ranska
• kroatia
• indonesia
• italia
• liettua
• malajalam
• hollanti
• Norjan nynorsk
• puola
• portugali
• brasilianportugali
• romania
• sloveeni
• turkki
• ukraina

It is also partially translated in the following languages:

• valkovenäjä (79%)
• tšekki (88%)
• saksa (99%)
• Esperanto (99%)
• viro (99%)
• suomi (98%)
• heprea (99%)
• unkari (99%)
• makedonia (94%)
• venäjä (99%)
• slovakki (87%)
• albania (99%)
• ruotsi (98%)
• kiina (perinteinen) (99%)

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 3.2.

This new version contains some bug fixes on multiple activities such as "Discover the International Morse code", "Control the hose-pipe" and music activities.

It also contains new graphics for all memory activities and for "Baby puzzle".

A new command-line argument (--difficulty {value|min-max}) has been added which allows users to force the difficulty filter at a given value or range.

The Andika font has been updated to its latest version (6.200).

It is fully translated in the following languages:

• bretoni
• katalaani
• katalaani (Valencia)
• kreikka
• brittienglanti
• espanja
• baski
• ranska
• kroatia
• italia
• liettua
• malajalam
• hollanti
• Norjan nynorsk
• puola
• portugali
• brasilianportugali
• romania
• sloveeni
• turkki
• ukraina
• kiina (perinteinen)

It is also partially translated in the following languages:

• azeri (99%)
• valkovenäjä (79%)
• tšekki (88%)
• saksa (99%)
• viro (99%)
• suomi (94%)
• heprea (99%)
• unkari (99%)
• indonesia (99%)
• makedonia (94%)
• venäjä (99%)
• slovakki (77%)
• albania (99%)
• ruotsi (98%)

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 3.1.

As we noticed that version 3.0 contained a critical bug in the new "Comparator" activity, we decided to quickly ship this 3.1 maintenance release to fix the issue.

It also contains some little translation update.

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 3.0.

It contains 182 activities, including 8 new ones:

• "Mouse click training" is an exercise to practice using a mouse with left and right clicks.
• In "Create the fractions", represent decimal quantities with some pie or rectangle charts.
• In "Find the fractions", it's the other way: write the fraction represented by the pie or rectangle chart.
• With "Discover the International Morse code", learn how to communicate with the International Morse code.
• In "Compare numbers", learn how to compare number values using comparison symbols.
• "Find ten's complement" is a simple exercise to learn the concept of ten's complement.
• In "Swap ten's complement", swap numbers of an addition to optimize it using ten's complement.
• In "Use ten's complement", decompose an addition to optimize it using ten's complement.

We've added 2 new command line options:

• List all the available activities (-l or --list-activities)
• Directly start a specific activity (--launch activityName)

This version also contains several improvements and bug fixes.

On the translation side, GCompris 3.0 contains 36 languages. 25 are fully translated: (Azerbaijani, Basque, Breton, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian). 11 are partially translated: (Albanian (99%), Belarusian (83%), Brazilian Portuguese (94%), Czech (82%), Finnish (94%), German (91%), Indonesian (99%), Macedonian (94%), Slovak (77%), Swedish (94%) and Turkish (71%)).

A special note about Ukrainian voices which have been added thanks to the organization "Save the Children" who funded the recording. They installed GCompris on 8000 tablets and 1000 laptops, and sent them to Digital learning Centers and other safe spaces for children in Ukraine.

Croatian voices have also been recorded by a contributor.

As usual you can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

For packagers of GNU/Linux distributions, note that we have a new dependency on QtCharts QML plugin, and the minimum required version of Qt5 is now 5.12. We also moved from using QtQuick.Controls 1 to QtQuick.Controls 2.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 2.4.

We optimized the size of all the packages for all platforms and of the external word images set (~30% smaller).

If you disabled the automatic download and want to have the full images set, you should go to the configuration and click on "Download full word image set".

The text "Full word image set is installed" is displayed below when you have the latest version.

Norwegian Nynorsk introduction voices have been added by Karl Ove Hufthammer and Øystein Steffensen-Alværvik. Malayalam voices have been completed by Aiswarya Kaitheri Kandoth.

Many images have been updated for several activities.

We have also fixed a few bugs in Renewable energy, Watercycle and Logical associations activities.

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Today we are releasing GCompris version 2.3.

As we noticed that version 2.2 had been shipped with a bug that broke 3 activities ("Alphabet sequence", "Even and odd numbers" and "Numbers in order"), we decided to fix it quickly with a new maintenance release.

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 2.2.

This is a maintenance release, so every GNU/Linux distribution shipping 2.0 or 2.1 should update to 2.2.

Here is a summary of included changes:

• New images and lot of little issues fixed in Watercycle and Renewable energy activities.
• New images in Tangram activity.
• Better letter ordering in the virtual keyboard (follows the locale set in GCompris).
• Fix a crash on Android when starting Balancebox activity.
• Many other little fixes and improvements.

On the translation side:

• Russian translation has been completed.
• New voices added for Norwegian Nynorsk (all except the introduction voices).

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store. The package for Raspberry Pi will also be available soon.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 2.1.

This is a maintenance release, so every GNU/Linux distribution shipping 2.0 should update to 2.1.

The most important change is that assets downloads on some older Android versions should now work again.

Here is a summary of included changes:

• Ship SSL certificate to download the assets for older Android phones/tablets which do not have it and fail to download data (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=447572).
• Graphics have been updated for Balance box and Erase activities.
• Fix a bug in reversecount where after the fish did one turn, it was not possible to win even when inputting the good result.
• Fix a freeze in learn_decimals activities when changing levels.
• Add bold tag for Keyboard controls line on path encoding activities.
• Fix bottom of the activities list not visible when scrolled down to the end.
• On Windows, remove the blurriness on HiDPI screens when installing GCompris.

On the translation side:

• Breton and Macedonian have been completed.
• Czech has returned (partial translation above 80% for now).

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store. The package for Raspberry Pi will also be available soon.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris 2.0. The educational value and the hours of fun and entertainment it provides children of all ages makes it the perfect present for these festive holidays.

It contains many new and improved activities. Below is a summary of included changes.

New activities:

• Baby mouse is for children learning to interact with a computer for the first time.
• Oware is a traditional African strategy game, it can be played against the computer or with a friend.
• In Path encoding (absolute or relative) children need to give a set of directions to follow a defined path in a grid.
• Path decoding (absolute or relative) is the opposite. Children have to create the path corresponding to a defined set of directions.
• In Learn quantities, the goal is to count how many items are needed to represent a quantity.
• In Learn decimal numbers, children cut units in pieces to learn the concept of decimal numbers.
• Learn decimal additions and Learn decimal subtractions use the same principles as Learn decimal numbers, but this time to practice these operations.
• With Ordering numbers, children can practice ordering numbers in ascending or descending order.
• With Ordering letters, children can practice ordering letters in alphabetical order or in reverse order.
• Ordering sentences is a step up in which children can practice reading and grammar by sorting out parts of a sentence.
• Positions is an activity to learn the terms describing the relative position of an object.

Improved activities:

• Analog electricity has a new set of tutorial level.
• Programming maze has a new dataset containing loops operations, and its tutorial images are now translated.
• Magic hat activities have new datasets for younger children.
• In Solar system we now use Earth days and years as unit for all planets.
• In Geography activities, all the maps have been redrawn and updated, using better projections and in svg format. We also added new maps for each part of Asia (East, Southeast, South, Central and Western).
• New images and visual improvements for Hanoï activities, Missing letter, Money activities, Photo hunter, Simple paint and Tangram.
• We have a new Inkscape extension to help creating svg maps and puzzles (https://invent.kde.org/education/gcompris/-/tree/master/tools/inkscape).

... and many more little fixes and improvements.

On the translation side, GCompris 2.0 contains 33 languages. 26 are fully translated: (Azerbaijani, Albanian, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian). 7 are partially translated: (German (96%), Norwegian Nynorsk (96%), Belarusian (83%), Macedonian (82%), Breton (80%), Turkish (76%) and Russian (76%)).

As usual you can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 1.1.

This is a maintenance release, so every GNU/Linux distribution shipping 1.0 should update to 1.1.

Here is a summary of included changes:

• Graphics have been updated for 21 activities.
• We have fixed lots of bugs.
• A build for Ubuntu Touch has been added.
• The spelling of the Turkish districts has been fixed.
• We added a minimal .msi alternative package for Windows.
• The GCompris executable has been relicenced to AGPLv3 due to a dependency of analog electricity.

On the translation side:

• Albanian, Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian have been completed.
• Irish Gaelic and Macedonian have returned (partial translation above 80% for now).
• Wordset for vocabulary activities has been added for Albanian and Macedonian.
• All the voices have been added for Lithuanian.

We have now 27 languages fully supported: Albanian, Basque, Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

We also have 4 languages partially supported: German (91%), Irish Gaelic (87%), Lithuanian (96%) and Norwegian Nynorsk (85%).

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store. The package for Raspberry Pi will also be available soon.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
To celebrate the 20 years of GCompris, we are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 1.0.

This new version contains a new major feature: the addition of the Activity Settings menu with Dataset selection for more than 50 activities, allowing to choose more specifically what can be learned on the activities.

We also added 4 new activities:

The long awaited Analog Electricity activity which allows us to draw circuits and run their simulation.

Learn digits and two subactivities to learn additions and subtractions. The aim is to teach these concepts to younger children, with easy computations.

Baby keyboard where, when a character is typed on the keyboard, we display it on the screen and play the corresponding voice if it exists.

Gravity, which replaces the old Intro Gravity, explains better the concept and is more realistic.

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS and Raspberry Pi on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store. Note that the MacOS package is not notarized.

You can check on this page the voices status in your language: https://gcompris.net/voicestats/. You can help us by providing a nice recording of your voice for all the missing entries in your native language.

On the translation side, we have 22 languages fully supported: Basque, Breton, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

We also have 4 languages partially supported: Belarusian (85%), Brazilian Portuguese (92%), German (89%), Lithuanian (84%).

As said in the previous news, we decided to only ship translations that are at least 80% completed to let the children have a better experience and not half translated software. Unfortunately, we had to drop the translation for: Estonian, Finnish, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Hindi, Macedonian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Russian, Slovak and Chinese Simplified.

If your language is in the partially supported list, or is no more or not yet supported at all, and you want to help, please contact us (support@gcompris.net) and we will give you instructions to get started translating.

Another way to help is to write some posts in your community about GCompris, and don't hesitate to give us some feedback.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce that the full version of GCompris is now available at no cost for every supported platform!

The installers for Windows and macOS on our website have been updated to not require activation code anymore, and the full version on the Play store and Microsoft store are now gratis.

We hope that this move will make it easier for all the children in the world to get access to the best educational software.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 0.97.

This new version contains 2 new activities:

A programming maze: to learn the basics of programming with a few instructions

Baby tangram: to learn the basics of tangram (this activity corresponds to the lowest levels of previous tangram activity)

And a lot of new features:

new sub-categories to organize activities

new background music feature and audio tracks

new volume settings for audio effects

new speed setting in several activities (gletters, algebra, readingh, note_names)

new feature in chess activities to display captured pieces

new option to go to next level manually in drawletters and drawnumbers

new voices for en_US

new images for colors activity

new images for advanced_colors activity

new images for target activity

improve settings layout

improve share activity layout

improve categorisation activity layout

resource files are now stored in KDE server (https://cdn.kde.org/)

add a tutorial to even/odd numbers

add intro to piano_composition

add malayalam dataset to gletters

add breton dataset to wordsgame

fix voices not playing in geography

fix sounds not playing in mining

fix portrait mode in binary_bulb

fix high cpu load in menu

fix hint image size in photo_hunter

fix layout in color_mix

and lots of other small fixes...

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store and the Windows store. For Raspberry Pi, we'll provide an installer soon. The updated version for iOS is still not available. Note that the MacOS package is not yet notarized, we will look at doing this during next year.

On the voices side, we added a new voice "try again" which is used in several activities instead of "check answer". You can check on this page if this voice is available in your language: https://gcompris.net/voicestats/ (in the "Misc" section). You can help us by providing a nice recording of your voice for all the missing entries in your native language.

On the translation side, we have 20 languages fully supported: Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, British English, Catalan, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, Galician, Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

We also have 15 languages partially supported: Belarusian (65%), Catalan (Valencian 95%), Chinese Simplified (66%), Estonian (93%), Finnish (86%), German (96%), Hindi (73%), Hungarian (95%), Indonesian (95%), Irish Gaelic (78%), Norwegian Nynorsk (93%), Russian (76%), Scottish Gaelic (67%), Slovenian (54%), Turkish (95%).

Usually we only ship translations that are at least 80% complete. However several translations dropped way below 80% (especially Slovenian, Belarusian and Scottish Gaelic ; but also Hindi, Russian and Irish Gaelic). We decided to keep those exceptionally for this release, and hope to see former or new translators complete those translations. If we get updates or new translations, we will make a release update.

So if your language is in the partially supported list, or is not yet supported at all, and you want to help, please contact us and we will give you instructions to get started translating.

Another way to help is to write some posts in your community about GCompris, and don't hesitate to give us feedbacks.

Notes:

For the Malayalam language, we noticed some issues with the default font "Andika-R". We recommend Malayalam users to select the font Noto-Sans-Malayalam or RaghuMalaylamSans from the application menu (if it is not available in the list you need to install this font on your system to be able to select it).

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 0.96.

This new version includes updated translation for several languages, and a few bug fixes.

Translations that received a big update:

Brazilian Portuguese (100%)

Breton (100%)

Finnish (90%)

Indonesian (100%)

Norwegian Nynorsk (97%)

Polish (100%)

This means we have now 19 languages fully supported: British English, Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Ukrainian.

We still have 15 partially supported languages: Basque (78%), Belarusian (68%), Chinese Simplified (69%), Estonian (62%), Finnish (90%), German (84%), Hindi (76%), Irish Gaelic (82%), Norwegian Nynorsk (97%), Russian (77%), Scottish Gaelic (70%), Slovak (62%), Slovenian (56%), Spanish (93%), Turkish (73%).

We decided again for this release to keep the translations that dropped below 80%. It would be sad to have to disable 10 languages from the application, but if no one updates the following translations, they will be disabled in next release: Basque, Belarusian, Chinese Simplified, Estonian, Hindi, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovak, Slovenian and Turkish.

For the windows version, we added a new entry in the start menu called GCompris (Safe Mode) to launch it with software rendering mode. This was needed as the auto-detection of OpenGL support was not reliable. Now, users can easily choose between OpenGL and software rendering without changing the configuration file.

Known issues:

The progress bar for downloads doesn't work anymore. This is a side effect from our switch to https for hosting the files. We are looking to improve this for next release.

As a side note dedicated to GNU/Linux distribution packagers, this new version now requires OpenSSL to be able to download voices and additional images.

As usual you can download this new version from our download page. It will also be available soon on the Android and Windows store.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
Good news for Mac users: we finally have a new version of GCompris for OSX !

The last version of GCompris for OSX was 0.52 from 3 years ago. Since then, no one in the team could update it because of the lack of hardware. Thanks to Boudewijn from the Krita Foundation, we have now a little mac mini, old but good enough to build our packages. It took me several days of dedicated work to learn this new platform and update the build system to produce a distributable package.

This package was built and tested on OSX 10.13. If you can try it on a different OSX version, please let us know if it works.

The .dmg installer is available on the download page.

This time we decided to stop distributing it from the app-store. About the iOS version, it will take some more time before I can look at it, and we still don't have any device to test.

Notes: this package is based on GCompris version 0.95. It is built with the latest version of Qt (5.12.0) which introduced some regressions. We fixed all of those issues, but some of those fixes are only in the development version for now. A few activities are broken (checkers, braille, braille_alphabet, algorithm), but we will make a new release next month that will also address those little issues.

Thank you all,
Timothée - GCompris team

Hi,
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 0.95.

This new version contains 7 new activities:

Binary bulbs: to learn how to count in binary

Railroad activity: to train visual memory

Solar System: to learn about our solar system

Name that Note: to learn to recognize musical notes and their names

Play Piano: to train reading notes on a score

Play Rhythm: to train following a musical rhythm

Piano Composition: to learn composition of a musical score

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux and Windows on the download page. This update will also be available in a few days on the Android and Windows store. For Raspberry Pi, we'll provide an installer in the beginning of 2019. The updated versions for MacOS and iOS are still not available, we hope to be able to release those during next year.

On the translation side, we have 15 languages fully supported: British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Malayalam, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Ukrainian.
We also have 19 languages partially supported: Basque (78%), Belarusian (69%), Brazilian Portuguese (74%), Breton (54%), Chinese Simplified (69%), Estonian (63%), Finnish (61%), German (86%), Hindi (77%), Indonesian (84%), Irish Gaelic (82%), Norwegian Nynorsk (89%), Russian (74%), Scottish Gaelic (71%), Slovak (62%), Slovenian (57%), Spanish (95%), Polish (94%), Turkish (74%).

Usually we only ship translations that are at least 80% complete. However for this release, several translations dropped below 80%. We decided to keep them exceptionally for this release, and hope to see former or new translators complete those translations. If we get updates or new translations, we will make a release update for those.
So if your language is in the partially supported list, or is not yet supported at all, and you want to help, please contact us and we will give you instructions to get started translating.

Another way to help is to write some posts in your community about GCompris, and don't hesitate to give us feedbacks.

Notes:

On GNU/Linux and Windows, we used to have two separate installers for OpenGL and software rendering. Now both rendering modes are available from the same installer. By default we try to use the OpenGL rendering, and if not working, we show an error and switch to the software rendering. This automatic switch is new and may not work everywhere. In case it doesn't, you can manually select the software rendering mode by editing the configuration file (in ~/.config/gcompris/gcompris-qt.conf for Linux, %LocalAppData%/gcompris/GCompris.conf for Windows): find the line "renderer=auto", replace auto with software and save the file. We are also interested to get some feedback to help us improve this auto-detection.

For the Malayalam language, we noticed some issues with the default font "Andika-R". We recommend Malayalam users to select the font Noto-Sans-Malayalam from the application menu (if it is not available in the list you need to install this font on your system to be able to select it).

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,
Here is GCompris 0.91, a new bugfix release to correct some issues in previous version and improve a few things.

Every GNU/Linux distribution shipping 0.90 should update to 0.91.

With 68 commits since last release, the full changelog is too long for this post. But here is a list to summarize the changes.

Activities:

fix English text in several activities

fix score position in several activities

block some buttons and interactions when needed in several places

lots of fixes for audio in several activities

number_sequence (and others based on it), fix base layout

update dataset for clickanddraw, drawnumbers and drawletters

crane, add localized dataset

lightsoff, add keyboard support and other fixes

algorithm, add keyboard support and other fixes

money, fixes for locale currency used

ballcatch, improve audio feedback

calendar, several little fixes

memory-case-association fix icons size

Other changes:

re-enable sound effects on linux

improved playback of sound effects, no more delay

add captions to images and OARS tags in the appdata

add Scottish Gaelic to core, and update some datasets for it

main bar, fix some items size

remove unused images

You can find this new version on the download page, and soon in the Play store and Windows store.

On the translation side, we have 16 languages fully supported: British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, Greek, Indonesian, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
We also have 15 languages partially supported: Norwegian Nynorsk (97%), Hindi (96%), Turkish (90%), Scottish Gaelic (86%), Galician (86%), Brazilian Portuguese (84%), Belarusian (84%), German (81%), Chinese Simplified (79%), Russian (78%), Estonian (77%), Slovak (76%), Finnish (76%), Slovenian (69%), Breton (65%).

If you want to help completing one of these translations or adding a new one, please contact us.

Else you can still help by making some posts in your community about GCompris and don't hesitate to give feedbacks.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,

We are happy to bring you GCompris 0.90.

This new version contains 8 new activities:

A calendar activity where the child learns how to use it (by Amit Sagtani)

Another activity based on calendar where the child has to find the date corresponding to a date + some days further/before this date (by Amit Sagtani))

An activity to learn how people on a family are related and how to call this relation (started by Rajdeep Kaur on a previous GSoC, completed by Rudra Nil Basu during last GSoC)

Another similar activity with questions about family members

An extension of memory activities where the child has to match lowercase letters with their corresponding uppercase (by Aman Gupta)

The same activity in two players mode with Tux (by Aman Gupta)

The Gtk+ port and improved submarine activity where the child learns a basic overview on how to run a submarine (by Rudra Nil Basu)

The digital electricity activity where the child can use different components to create an electric schema. There is also a tutorial mode to explain how to use each component (started by Pulkit Gupta on previous GSoC, completed by Rudra Nil Basu)

We always have new features, content and bug fixes:

Updated graphics on several activities by Timothée Giet

Irish translation, voices and datasets by Séamus Ó Briain

Lot of improvements on removing overriding elements issues (score were hidden behind the bar...)

Add Tutorial item to be able to have activity introductions with both images and texts

Add easy mode in letter in word with less words displayed

Add license page

Lots of small bug fixes

You can find this new version on the download page.

On the translation side, we have 14 languages fully supported: British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional , Dutch, French, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian;
And some partially supported: Belarusian (87%), Brazilian Portuguese (87%), Breton (65%), Chinese Simplified (80%), Estonian (79%), Finnish (78%), Galician(87%), German (83%), Hindi (86%), Irish Gaelic (99%), Norwegian Nynorsk (86%), Russian (80%), Slovak (76%), Slovenian (70%), Polish (99%), Turkish (93%).

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris and don't hesitate to give feedbacks.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

As the title says, you can now buy the full version of GCompris for Windows 10 from the Windows Store.

This is a good way to make it more visible and easy to find for new users. Also, if you buy GCompris from the Windows Store, you get automatic updates, you can install it easily on all your Windows systems, and it will run in a sandbox.

Spread the word !

If you prefer to not use the store, or if you only want the free demo version, you can still download it from our Download page, and buy the activation code to unlock all the activities. The store is just one more way to distribute GCompris, and to provide some income to support the project.

As usual, the full version is free on Free-Software operating systems like GNU/Linux, but for proprietary operating systems like Windows, the full version has a cost. Of course, the source code of GCompris is and will always be under a Free-Software license.

Note: the package on the store contains the version using the software renderer instead of OpenGL, since it's the only way we have for now to make sure it will work on any computer. If you really want the version using OpenGL, get it from our Download page.

We are very happy to bring you GCompris 0.81, this time on Raspberry Pi.

This version for Raspberry Pi was made possible thanks to the new "light" mode that we've been working on (read the previous post to learn more about this new rendering mode).

It was built and tested on Raspberry Pi 3, where it works good. Since it was not tested a lot yet, this first package is considered beta. Please report any issue you may experience with it. If you can try it on a Pi 2, please let us know the result. It was also not tested on Pi 1, but those probably don't have enough cpu and/or ram to run it.

The installer is on the Download page with all instructions needed to use it.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

We are happy to bring you GCompris 0.81.

This is a bugfix release to correct some issues in previous version. All GNU/Linux distributions shipping 0.80 should update to 0.81.

Also, we introduce a new "light" version that doesn't require OpenGL to run. This means that it should work on any computer. We provide some special windows packages using this option, and also the standalone installer for GNU/Linux 32bit is using this option. In this light version, the transparency gradient on the menu is gone, and we had to adapt a dozen of activities that will look a little different in this mode, but should still be usable.

We also added a new Download page on the website, with instructions for each operating system.

Last but not least, we now have translation for Indonesian, thanks to some very nice contributors who organised a sprint in Indonesia to work on it.

The most important changes in this version are:

Categorization, fix the "Shape" category

Categorization, fix the menu layout

Categorization, display score in expert mode

Guesscount, fix invalid result

Add Indonesian locale

Fix the missing copyright and licence info

Fix a font issue on windows version

Add a new minimal version with software rendering (requires Qt 5.8)

Activities modified to run with software rendering:

crane

categorization

lang

hanoi

tangram

land_safe

click_on_letter

left/right

hexagon

magic_hat

color_mix

color_mix_light

You can find this new version here:

Android:

The new version is available in the Android store

Windows:

Windows 32bit or Windows 64bit version

Windows (light version - No OpenGL):

Windows 32bit - No OpenGL or Windows 64bit - No OpenGL version

Linux:

If your distribution doesn't provide an updated package, use one of those standalone installers. They must be launched from command line, after adding executable permission on the file. Check the Download page for more info.
Linux 32bit or Linux 64bit version

Source code

md5sums :

For all downloads: md5sums

GPG verification :

The source tarball, the windows and the GNU/Linux installers are signed. You can retrieve the public key over https here: 0x63d7264c05687d7e.asc.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,

We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 0.80.

This new version contains 6 new activities:

a categorization activity where the child has to categorize item depending on the theme (by Divyam Madaan)

a guess count game where the child has to find the good operation to find a given number (by Rahul Yadav)

a game where you have to let the opponent put the last ball (by Utkarsh Tiwari)

same as above but the child plays with a friend (by Utkarsh Tiwari)

a checkers game (by Johnny Jazeix)

same as above but the child plays with a friend (by Johnny Jazeix)

We always have new features and bug fixes:

Polish lang dataset by Łukasz Wojniłowicz

Swedish lang dataset by Stefan Asserhäll

Ukrainian lang dataset by Yuri Chornoivan

new icons

updated graphics on several activities

lots of bug fixes

website translation migrated to KDE infrastructure and translated in Belarusian, Catalan, Catalan (Valencia), Romanian, Portuguese and Ukrainian

new mingw windows builds

partial translations in Greek and Hindi

You can find this new version here:

Android:

The new version is available in the Android store

Windows:

Windows 32bit or Windows 64bit version

Linux:

If your distribution doesn't provide an updated package, use one of those standalone installers. They must be launched from command line, after adding executable permission on the file. (based on Centos7 - will not work on distributions with older system libraries).
Linux 32bit or Linux 64bit version

Source code

md5sums :

For all downloads: md5sums

GPG verification :

The source tarball, the windows and the GNU/Linux installers are signed. You can retrieve the public key over https here: 0x63d7264c05687d7e.asc.

On the translation side, we have 17 languages fully supported: Belarusian, British English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Dutch, French, Galician, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian; and some partially: Breton (75%), Chinese Simplified (88%), Chinese Traditional (90%), Estonian (91%), Finnish (63%), German (92%), Greek (90%), Hindi (98%), Russian (88%), Slovak (88%), Slovenian (80%).

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Hi,

just in time for Christmas, we are pleased to announce you the new GCompris version 0.70.

It is an important release because we officially drop the Gtk+ version for Windows to use the Qt one. Everyone who bought the full version for the last two years will get a new activation code in a few days.

Also, for people who like numbers, we are beyond 100000 downloads in the google play store.

This new version contains 8 new activities, half of them being created by last Google Summer of Code students:

an activity where the child has to move elements to build a given model (crane by Stefan Toncu)

an activity to draw the numbers from 0 to 9 (drawnumbers by Nitish Chauhan)

an activity to draw the letters (drawletters by Nitish Chauhan)

an activity to find on which words a given letter belongs (letter-in-word by Akshat Tandon)

the nine men morris game against Tux (nine_men_morris by Pulkit Gupta)

the nine men morris game with a friend (nine_men_morris_2_players by Pulkit Gupta)

an activity to learn to split a given number of candies amonst children (share by Stefan Toncu)

an activity to learn roman numbers (roman_numerals by Bruno Coudoin)

We always have new features and bug fixes:

search feature by Rishabh Gupta

windows build by Bruno Coudoin and Johnny Jazeix

hint icon in the bar (used in photohunter) by Johnny Jazeix

neon build by Jonathan Riddell

we are now in openSUSE Tumbleweed repository thanks to the Bruno Friedmann

archlinux (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gcompris-qt/) by Jose Riha

package on mageia cauldron by Timothee Giet

package for KaOS by demm

word list for Slovakia by Jose Riha

word list for Belarusian by Antos Vaclauski

various updates on Romanian wordlists and voices (probably the most complete one) by Horia Pelle

voices added for Portuguese Brazilian by Marcos D.

new graphics for crane by Timothee Giet

screenshots on gcompris.net updated to the Qt version by Timothee and Johnny

You can find this new version here:
Android version
Windows 32bit or Windows 64bit version
Linux version (64bit)
source code

On the translation side, we have 15 languages fully supported: Belarusian, British English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Dutch, Estonian, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and some partially: Breton (82%), Chinese Simplified (93%), Chinese Traditional (91%), Finnish (70%), Galician (93%), German (97%), Norwegian Nynorsk (98%), Russian (83%), Slovak (85%), Slovenian (88%), Turkish (77%).

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

After 7 months, we are proud to announce the new version of GCompris 0.61.

One important change on the commercial side of GCompris. Bruno Coudoin is now replaced by Timothée Giet as the commercial entity. Timothée is a graphic artist with a long list of contributions on GCompris and in the KDE community. After 16 years of continuous development on GCompris, Bruno is willing to step down and gives the opportunity to a new team to bring the project forward. For now, all sales go to Timothée and he is in charge of the commercial support. There are no changes in the licensing nor in the development process which is still under the responsability of the KDE community (Johnny Jazeix being the most active contributor).

The new activities are:

A simple wordprocessor (baby_word_processor by Bruno Coudoin), this activity is not available on mobile platforms due to issues with the virtual keyboard: if we only use the real keyboard, styles don't apply and if we only use the virtual keyboard, we can't navigate in the text, select it...

A tangram (by Bruno Coudoin). It starts with children friendly levels to introduce each concepts little by little and end up in the real tangram.

Explore the monuments of the world (explore_monuments by Ayush Agrawal during SoK).

An activity in which the children must color a graph so that no two adjacent nodes have the same color (graph_coloring by Akshat Tandon during SoK).

Pilot the spaceship towards the green landing area (land_safe by Holger Kaelberer).

Find the differences between the two pictures (photo_hunter by Stefan Toncu).

Timothée Giet updated images for chess, hangman and horizontal/vertical reading activities along with the gcompris logo.

Lots of little fixes/improvements have been done (storing and restoring the window's width/height at start-up, docbook updated, levels/images bonus, adding an internal dataset for words games so that we no more expect the network to run GCompris (except for the voices but they also can be bundled in the binary).

On translation side, we have 17 languages fully supported: Belarusian, British English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Simplified, Dutch, French, Galician, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and some partially: Breton (88%), Chinese Traditional (97%), Estonian (82%), Finnish (74%), German (93%), Russian (83%), Slovak (76%), Slovenian (82%), Turkish (82%)

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

The source code tarball is available here (GNU/Linux packagers are welcome)

For Android it is available on the Google play store.

I am glad to announce that GCompris is now available on the Apple iOS store (iPad and iPhone).

Two years ago I just went out with the insane project of rewriting GCompris in Qt Quick and provide a version to mobile users. Many of you joined the project and made the dream comes true. We now have a free software for children available on all major platforms and most important we give them the ability to choose a free operating system.

We now have a solid software foundation, a vibrant little community and almost completed the Gtk+ port. There are still many things to do. I would like to see more innovative activities, we can experiment, exchange with teachers and find activities that will help them and the children in their teaching.

Just on time for Christmas and after 6 months of hard work we are shipping GCompris 0.50. So far we have many fixes and improvements all around in 563 commits done by 17 contributors and more than 20 translators.

Just looking at the 12 new activities:

Bruno: A single player and two player chess activity. It shows the children the possibilities of each pieces and is very easy to win against at first levels.

Bruno: An activity where the children listen to the sound sequence played, and reproduce it by clicking on xylophone's bars.

Siddhesh Suthar (part of GSoC): The children is proposed a set of words. Each word is shown with a voice, a text and an image. When done, an exercise asks him to find the right word given the voice.

Pulkit Gupta: A puzzle with famous paintings.

Johnny Jazeix, A reading practice activity. Some words are moving, it trains the children to read.

Sagar Chand Agarwal (part of GSoC): A scientific simulation where the children click on the different stages to make up the power supply.

Sagar Chand Agarwal (part of GSoC): The water system. In it, the children has to click on different active elements: sun, cloud, pumping station, and the sewage treatment plant, in order to reactivate the entire water system.

Holger: A fine motor skill practice activity. The children must navigate the ball to the door. Be careful to not make it fall into the holes. On mobile it uses the accelerometer. For this activity we have integrated the box2d engine ( https://github.com/qml-box2d/qml-box2d ).

Rajdeep Kaur: The classical hangman. The children must guess the letters of the given word. To help, on every wrong try, a part of the image representing the word will be revealed.

Languages supported: Brazilian Portuguese, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, Finnish (92% translated), French, Galician, German, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Russian (98% translated), Slovak (92% translated), Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

A loading overlay is now available to let the user know that some actions (loading a level in an activity for example) is taking place and can take some seconds. We also fixed visual glitches in some activities due to a misuse of ColorOverlay and Colorize items.

Thanks to all of you who step by step make GCompris the outstanding educational software it is now.

So far 2 years after the start of the Qt Quick port we completed the rewrite of 114 activities out of the 140 of the Gtk+version. You can check the status of the port. If we keep this momentum we can expect to announce the completion of the port somewhere next year.

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

The source code tarball is available here (GNU/Linux packagers are welcome)

For Android it is available on the Google play store.

Bug fixes and improvements:

• core, proper locale detection from the env variable
• explore_wold_animals, changed the map background
• german translation fix for letter 'b' broken in hangman
• play_piano, fix string too large for button in some languages
• play_rhythm, made a bigger text area to accomodate larger translations
• add a generic-name entry in our desktop file
• windows, set a bat file as a startup entry point to avoid the R6034 error
• piano_composition, fix image name (eighth instead of quarter) by Johnny Jazeix

Translations update:

• Added Bosnian translation by Samir Ribic
• Fixes to Catalan translation by Jordi Mas
• Updated ALL_LINGUAS by Piotr Drąg
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký
• Updated Hebrew translation by Yosef Or Boczko
• Updated Hungarian translation by Balázs Úr
• Updated Lithuanian translation by Aurimas Černius
• Updated Portuguese translation by Pedro Albuquerque
• Updated Scottish Gaelic translation
• Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles
• Updated Swedish translation by Anders Jonsson and Josef Andersson
• Updated Turkish translation by Atilla ÖNTAŞ

Voices:

• Updated Brazilian Portuguese by Marcos Dias Meneghel
• Initial catalan voices by Antoni Bella Pérez

The Randa meeting is an annual KDE sprint that takes place in Randa, Switzerland from the 6th to the 13th of September.

Participants donate their time to help improve the software you love and this is why we need money to cover hard expenses like accommodation and travel to get the volunteer contributors to Randa. The Randa Meetings will benefit everyone who uses KDE software.

This year, the GCompris team will go to Randa Meetings to continue and finalize the Qt Quick port. After one and a half year of development we ported 100 activities on the 140 of the Gtk+ version. We have several activities in the pipe coming from our Google of Code students. In Randa we will continue the review and integration of the pending activities, and define how we will implement the most challenging ones that remains to be ported. We will also take this opportunity to record the voice of any participant to improve our international support.

You can support the Randa Meetings by making a donation, following the official page.

The release 0.41 is available on the Google play store.

Since last version (0.34), we added 17 activities making GCompris going over 100 activities (103 to be precise): algebra_div, babymatch, babyshapes, braille_fun, chronos, details, geo-country, geography, hanoi, hanoi_real, imagename, intro_gravity, louis-braille, simplepaint, superbrain, tic_tac_toe and tic_tac_toe_2players.

Moreover, thanks to KDE translation teams, we have 16 languages fully supported: Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Slovenian (new), Portuguese, Polish, Norwegian Nynorsk, Italian, German (new), Galician (new), French, Dutch, Chinese Traditional, Catalan, British English and Brazilian Portuguese.

Also, following out indiegogo campaign, Timothée Giet managed to update all icons (activities + core ones) along with some background images. You can see the result in this video.

Bug fixes and improvements:

• missing_letter, data fix for bolsa and pastel in Spanish by Edy Paz
• lang, fix a bug in case of excactly 12 triplets in the dataset by Jan Boon
• trying to avoid a crash case in the menu by Bruno Coudoin
• gletters, add Norwegian Bokmål dataset based on the Nynorsk one by Bruno Coudoin
• Fix a typo in submarine.c by Gabor Kelemen

Translations update:

• Updated Russian translation by Stas Solovey
• Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles
• Updated Serbian translation by Мирослав Николић
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation by Rafael Ferreira
• Updated Hungarian translation by Balázs Úr
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký
• Updated Hungarian translation by Balázs Úr

Bug fixes and improvements:

• A new activity in the reading section to learn words. Currently supports German, English, Spanish, French, Gaelic and Brazilian Portuguese
• Menu, add a message when we have no favorite
• Menu, better icon for locked activities
• Falling letters, adaptative falling speed on success / failure
• Color mixing, fixed broken image on some system. Fixed text position.
• Fix a crash in restricted profile.
• Disabled particle effects as it crashes on several Android devices
• Our VirtualKeyboard has a larger key height
• On many activities, normalized difficulty levels. Now level 1 does not require reading skills.
• DialogConfig, allow to set a base font-size
• DialogConfig, better layout in portrait mode
• Android: stop all audio playback when application leaves active state
• Ask for downloading voices at the first start
• No more show the blocked activities if in demo mode (An option can enable it)
• Update of Andika and OpenDyslexic fonts

Translations update:

Ukrainian (Yuri Chornoivan), Swedish (Stefan Asserhäll), Portuguese (José Nuno Coelho Pires), Polish (Łukasz Wojniłowicz), French (Ludovic Grossard), Dutch (Freek de Kruijf), Chinese Simplified (Weng Xuetian), Brazilian Portuguese (Luiz Fernando Ranghetti).

New translations:

Norwegian Nynorsk (Karl Ove Hufthammer), Italian (Vincenzo Reale), Catalan (Antoni Bella Pérez), British English.

Developpers:

Bruno Coudoin, Burkhard Lück, Holger Kaelberer, Johnny Jazeix, Karl Ove Hufthammer, Luigi Toscano, Paolo Gibellini.

We are happy to announce that we published on Google play store the first public version of GCompris.

We are launching a crowd funding campain with the goal to bring a new improved and unified graphics to GCompris.

Currently the graphics are one of the weakest part, as they were mostly done by the developers, using free graphics assets and sparse graphic artist contributions.

To address this problem, we found Timothée Giet, a talented graphic artist interested in working on a complete graphics redesign. He is a long standing Free-Software contributor, active member of the Krita team and so part of the KDE community.

Making new graphics for more than 100 activities is a big work, so we need your help to achieve this goal..

Be a part of bringing reading, writing, and arithmetic to 250 million kids.

XPRIZE has launched the Global Learning XPRIZE to incentivize teams to create tablet-based Open Source software that will teach a child to read, write, and perform arithmetic, fully autonomously. The impact of this technology is to bring literacy to over 250 million children around the world. Give a child the gift of literacy.

Do you think GCompris has something to bring and should participate. Do you have ideas on how to reach this goal? Join the GCompris developer mailing list and tell us, we need your feedback, we need you.

GCompris coding session in the Alps

GCompris is now officially a KDE application. As such, our development community is proud to participate for the first time to the KDE Randa meeting. This is an excellent opportunity for the GCompris developers to meet in real life and get in touch with experienced KDE developers. Please consider making a donation to help us finance this development sprint.

Major fixes

• Exclude known symbol fonts from the font selector
• Now the python path separator is ';' on windows. Before that it was not possible to install GCompris on another disk drive on Windows (other than C:)
• Added missing timer images (the balloon) in the multiplication table activity.

Translation update

• Updated Russian translation by Yuri Myasoedov
• Updated Greek translation by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Updated french translation by Bruno Coudoin
• Updated Norwegian bokmål translation by Erlend Thune

Just a little video showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.

Major feature

• Added support for multigraph languages in click_on_letter by GunChleoc.
• Added a font selector in the config dialog box by Bruno Coudoin. This feature replaces the skin selector. Removed the skin gartoon as it is useless now.

I have been particularly discreet for several months. It is not a sign of disinterest in this project, quiet the opposite.

In fact as you imagine, many users are requesting us a tablet version of GCompris and I tried to evaluate the different technical possibilities to bring GCompris to this world. Sadly, Gtk+ the core technology we are based on does not provide any easy way to run on tablet.

Major features

• A new activity in the reading section that presents a set of image, text and voice to children and an exercise set around them. This includes about 1000 images and voices in English, Spanish, French, and Gaelic-Scottish. The images and voices come from the Art4Apps project, a big thanks to them for providing a such useful resource (under CC BY-SA). If you want to thanks Art4Apps for their hard work please consider making a donation on their site.

Our web site was ten years old, a major refresh was more than needed.

This new one is no more based on a CMS engine but is coded in python with the jinja2 template engine and generated statically.

The site is now generated on the fly including the screenshots pages. Very important, the new site translation is managed through po files like the GCompris code base making it easier for translators to localize the web site.

The source of the site can be found on github here

A few month ago a developer team made an iOS port of GCompris. They just made another port, this time for Android. It is available under the name 'yellow duck' on Google Play.

The code is under GPL but you have to ask them to get the source, there is no public repository.

There are a lot of activities, sadly many are not enough polished as we may expect but what this team did is impressive.

I am glad to announce that a small developper team made a clone of some GCompris activities running on iOS (Apple iPhone / iPad). It is named 'Yellow Duck'.

It works like GCompris on Windows, you can dowload it for free and perform an in app purchase to access all the activities.

Of course, as they use the resources in GCompris that are for most under GPL, their software is also released under GPL.

The GCompris development team is happy to propose you a new version of GCompris numbered 12.11. This release includes 13 new activities, probably more than any release of GCompris so far.

GCompris is a popular high quality educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10.

And when we say multi-activities, we really mean a lot. We now have 136 activities in GCompris!

I would like to give a special thanks to Gnome and Google for their support in allowing us to have two students working three months full time on GCompris last summer.

Here is a summary of the new activities sorted by contributors:

Who said GCompris does not run on tablet ?

You don’t imagine the number of people complaining the GCompris does not run on tablet, phone and tv. It is way too much work to port it. I am glad to show the world that choosing the proper hardware, developers don’t have to recode everything.

Look at the video here.

The release 12.05 is mostly a maintenance release, no new activities have been included. Many bug fixes and translation updates.

Beth Hadley:

• Louis_braille activity: fixed a wrong fact

Bruno Brouard:

• Updated French translation

Bug fixes

• Windows installer: fixed a potential directory erasing at uninstall or reinstall time. Properly erase all our files at unistallation time
• Windows: updated the compilation chain for windows to compile against GTK 2.24
• Desktop entry: Added the Education category
• Compilation: Added ifdefs to compile with gdkpixbuf > 2.24 by Hans de Goede
• Guessnumber: fixed a potential crash at exit time. Give focus on the entry box.
• Braille fun: added audio feedback.
• Braille alphabet: improved to audio play the letter to find
• Baille lotto: fixed not to go back to the main menu at the end. Improved it a little bit the layour to accomodate with longer translated text. Added sound effects.
• Shapegame: Fixed a random crash in shapegame activities that happened while dragging a piece. Minor, now clicking on the left/right image selector does not trig the ok check.
• findit: Fixed to run on Windows 7
• clockgame: the first levels now highlight the hour sectors to make them easier to recognize and to teach. (By Angelo Naselli)
• Instruments activity: added a check for sound availability in the icon menu. Now the background music is muted when entering this activity.
• Memory: minor fix in memory activity to fix their reference to their mandatory audio file. Without this, a little audio error does appear at run time in the activity icon.

Sadly, GCompris was not working at all on Windows Seven. I just made a new binary version (gcompris-11.12-2.exe) that fixes the problem.

Improvements

• wordlist in Spanish: added more words to the spanish list. By Germana Oliveira.

Bug fixes

• Updated French translation, there was a string with the text being there twice causing the gnumch activity to have the text over sized and unreadable.
• By Hans de Goede rsvg: fixed deprecated issue releated to rsvg. wordsgame: manage depracation of the g_mutex_lock versus g_static_mutex_lock cleanup, replaced deprecated g_strcasecmp by g_ascii_strcasecmp wordsgame activity: fixed race conditions
• minor: made bigger icons to avoid pixelized icon in desktop task switchers.
• hangman: unsupported locale in GCompris was making this activity crash. Fixes bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662576
• core: now handle the ’C’ locale as en_US Currently a ’C’ locale was interpreted in GCompris by Catalan.

Translations updates

• Updated Albanian translation by Abdulsalem Osmani
• Fixed spelling mistake in Norwegian Nynorsk by Karl Ove Hufthammer
• Updated Greek translation for gcompris by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Updated Slovenian translation by Matej Urbančič
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký
• Updated German translation by Mario Blättermann
• Updated Turkish translation by Muhammet Kara
• Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles
• Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles

New Activities

• A set of activities to discover the Braille system. They have been made by Srishti Sethi this summer (part of the Gnome Summer of Code):
• The history of Louis Braille
• Discover the Braille system
• Training using a funny game, like falling letters but with Braille
• Braille lotto to remember Braille numbers.
• click on letter uppercase: same as click on letter but with only upper case. Now the old activity ’click on letter’ poposes only lower case.

Activity updates

• erase activity: added new animals from picture by Adrien Grellier and Claire Gegout from their Antarctic trip.
• shapegame activities: now we display the ok button when all shapes are placed even with errors We also show a red cross indicating the children errors. Thanks to Arnaud Limon for the suggestion. Fixed a potential crash when a piece was overwritten by another in their wrong position.
• Changed the combo locale system to display the language in their textual form instead of their locale code. Maintain them sorted to make it even easier to use. Now activites with locale configuration use this feature.
• Mostly full rewrite of the click on letter activity to allow a specific configuration per language and per user. Now this activity takes a desktop formated file as input. It contains for each level the questions and answers charaters to propose. This file can be edited in the game through the config button, in this case a local data file is save under the user’s My GCompris folder and is reused. Now for each country we must provide a data file, this is much better than before where it was fully random and was not respecting the natural difficulties of a language. If this file is missing we create the level automatically from the alphabet (or from the english one for Latin based alphabet) now display the text of the question if we cannot play it for any reason which makes this activity playable even if we don’t have the voice set or the sound is disabled. Also if one letter is missing from the voice set it remains playable. Improved the graphism. based on an openclipart image. Splitted click on letter in two activities, on with lowercase one with uppercase as suggested by Sylvain Dechy.
• memory sound activity: the tux band background image with the bsd devil is considered offensive in some country. Now the bsd devil looks less like a devil and more like a red little boy.
• wordsgame activity: changed the text color of the falling words to be back and white I found out that reading text in color other than black and white is very hard.
• In login.py and tuxpaint, reactivated the config button that was missing.
• memory activity: fixed several potential crash cases when the memory was run with sound disabled.
• Now in the hangman, we display the name of the current language.
• Advanced color activity: fixed color names not to include _ when composed of 2 names.
• Fixed the 2 click drag mode ( run it with gcompris -g 2clicks).
• findit: no more ask several times a missing answer at the end of the level
• geo-country activity: added the italian country map with 3 sub levels, north, central and south.
• bar: added the keyboard shortcut ctrl-b do hide/show the GCompris control bar. Now when changing the level, the sound is played before starting the activity in order not to flush the own activity sound.
• advanced_color: remade this activity based on the new findit engine.
• details-activity: Fixed the TajMahal level. References to images was wrong.

Voices

• New voice set for Thai by Thummarat Phromphing
• English voices: new recordset of our english voices by Julia Wycherley with the help of Philip Morris.

We have 2 students working on GCompris this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code 2011. This year for the first time I proposed GCompris as a project and myself as a mentor.

Srishti will be working on adding activities to let non blind children discover the blind world by learning the Braille code.

Karthik will let our children discover the music world, an important domain in which GCompris is weak.

This is a bug fix release that includes the following changes:

• submarine: Reworked it deeply. It had several stability issues. At the same time, improved the graphism a little bit. Fixed major crash in submarine that arrived when the children won.
• click and draw: Fixed, it was not starting at all.
• renewable energy: On some system the wind farm was taking too much CPU.

New features

• Added 2 new activities to learn to give money make in a shop. This is based on the money activity but now the children must give back money to Tux.
• Now the erase activity reads the .jpg file in its data directory instead of being hardcoded. In the erase activity we have a large number of animal backgrounds. Now these are found at run time instead of being hard coded. Also the user can add its own images in the directory /My GCompris/erase. Added more animal images taken from wikipedia.
• New renewable energy activity. Learn about electric dam, wind farm and solar panels works. This is heavily based on the watercycle activity.
• In money activity, we no more auto check the answer, there is now an OK button Created 3 price categories in money activtiy to make the game more realistic. As suggested by Arnaud Champollion, it is just too easy for the children.
• improved the drawnumber activity to have its dataset taken from a file instead of hardcoded. Now we have a text file named activity.txt that contains the images and points coordinate. converted .png files in .jpg in drawnumber activity to save disk space.

Bug Fixes

• In the submarine activity, we now destroy and reset the frigate motion when we enter the help. Not doing so makes the children loose the game while reading the manual.
• Added a reset button for the locale in the configuration dialog. It is now easier to get back on the default locale. Sorted the locales following their english name instead of the locale code
• Deadlock occurs if new playback is scheduled from callback. Observed with sound-memory activity, while playing ’bonus’. In this fix, the sound is player in the gtk idle loop instead of being called directly (Fixed by Andreas Fenkart)
• Major random crash fix. In python activity, a call to gcompris.skin.svg_get() was freeing the skin object but it should not. This resulted in random crashes at any point in GCompris when trying to read the skin svg_handle.
• Fixed code to compile with the -Werror=unused-but-set-variable gcc new compilation flag.
• Fixed invisible cursor on 64 bits systems. The propoerty struct is now properly initialized even on 64 bits systems. Fixed by Peter Ujfalusi.
• Watercycle activity: Added toolips to explain the different items. Fixed a minor race issue. Added a bonus flower feedback in watercycle to let the children knows he completed the level. Thanks to Clara Coudoin for the feedback, it is great to have close beta testers.
• Added missing image files for money activity.
• Added missing activity files for drawnumber.
• String updates, requested translation for paintings. As reported by Friedel Wolff: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636887
• Cleanup, removed unused concept of activity board_dir This concept is no more use. Now we use the concept of a global package_data_dir found in the properties.

Translations updates

• Added Montenegrin translation by Montenegro Consulting Company by Montenegro Consulting Company
• Added Slovenian translation by Matej Urbančič
• Much longer word list for Norwegian Nynorsk. by Karl Ove Hufthammer
• New word list for Czech by Marek Černocký by Bruno Coudoin
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Cernocky by Petr Kovar
• Updated Arabic translation by Khaled Hosny
• Updated Arabic translation by Khaled Hosny
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation by Frederico Gonçalves Guimarães
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký
• Updated Danish translation by Joe Hansen
• Updated Danish translation by Joe Hansen
• Updated Esperanto translation by Kristjan SCHMIDT
• Updated French translation by Claude Paroz
• Updated Galician translations by Fran Diéguez
• Updated Galician translations by Gonçalo Cordeiro
• Updated German translation by Christian Kirbach
• Updated Greek translation by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Updated Hungarian translation by Gabor Kelemen
• Updated Norwegian Nynorsk translation (still some missing strings). by Karl Ove Hufthammer
• Updated Slovenian translation by Andrej Žnidaršič
• Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles
• Updated Spanish translation by Sylvia Sánchez
• Updated Swedish translation by Daniel Nylander
• Updated Swedish translation by Daniel Nylander
• Updated Swedish translation by Daniel Nylander
• Updated Traditional Chinese translation(Hong Kong and Taiwan) by Chao-Hsiung Liao
• Updated asturian translation by Xandru Armesto
• Updated breton translation by Alan Monfort
• Updated translation and added new word list for Afrikaans (af) by Friedel Wolff
• Updated German translation by Mario Blättermann
• Updated Russian translation by Yuri Myasoedov
• New translation for Zulu by Priscilla Mahlangu

Warning: Due to a last minute packaging issue, this release has been re-issued under the number 9.5.

Major changes

• Fixed level 8 of babyshapes. The makefile was missing all the images for this level. I reworked the files so that they lie in the resource directory instead of subdirectories.
• New hangman activity. Icon is a a modified one from Mathieu’s icon set. The cute background is based on a drawing Franck Doucet made for our bargame activity. This activity uses our default-.xml files to propose words to the children. It is thus very important now to have them properly filled. For now I did the work for English and French. Translators, please refer to this page for instructions
• Added details activity by Marc Levivier. In the spirit of famous painting discovery, in this activity the painting is complete and the children must put painting parts on the right places.
• New feature in the chat activity. The user has a shared white boards now. This has been developped by Fionn Ziegler.
• First release of an in progress tool that converts wiktionary xml dumps in an xml file. For now, it works only for French, this page tracks the progress. The idea behind this is to get an xml formatted dictionnary to create new activities in the reading / writing area. For now this is just not used in GCompris.
• In planegame now the numbers are spoken when the plane hit the correct cloud.
• Added missing configuration button in several activites where it makes sense. Now teachers / children can set force uppercase in click on letter, falling wards, falling letter, horizontal/vertical reading. Thanks to Luciana from sleducacional.org
• Added missing level for photohunter by Marc Levivier
• Added the option —disable-level. Some teacher want to be sure the children don’t skip a level.
• Now the click on letter activity can be played also with the keybord. This has been suggested by Sini Ruohomaa.
• Fixed reference to tuxpaint dataset. Now we display saved tuxpaint images in our image selector again. Thanks to the person in Latinoware 2010 who reported me that this feature has been lost.
• The configuration of the ’missing letter’ activity was not working for UTF-8 multibyte characters (bugzilla). Added a tooltip to better explain the different fields.
• Refined the sudoku’s level for scholl usage (By Sylvain Dechy).
• Changed the difficulty level of the maze activity to make it more usable in classrooms. (By Sylvain Dechy)

Voices

New voice set for Slovenian by Saša Batistič

Translations

As for each release, many translation have been updated

• Alan Monfort (br)
• Aleksey Lim (es)
• Andrej Žnidaršič (sl)
• Bruno Brouard (fr)
• Christian Kirbach (de)
• Fran Diéguez (gl)
• Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes (pt_BR)
• Gabor Kelemen (hu)
• Giannis Kaskamanidis (el)
• Gonçalo Cordeiro (gl)
• Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio (eu)
• Joe Hansen (da)
• Jorge González (es)
• Karl Ove Hufthammer (nn)
• Mantas Kriaučiūnas (lt)
• Marek Černocký (cs)
• Mario Blättermann (de)
• Petr Kovar (cs)
• Reuma Mordechai (he)
• Xandru Armesto (ast)
• Yannis Kaskamanidis (el)

Back from Latinoware in Brazil, it was a great experience for me to go that far and discover how much GCompris is appreciated.

I met the organisation sleducational.org which is focused on free software in education and driven by teachers. They are making a great job in explaining how free software can be used in day to day training. They know pretty well GCompris since Frederico, the team leader, is also the translator of GCompris in Brazilian Portuguese.

To me, it is an excellent news to see an organisation taking our work further and providing a local support to teachers in Brazil looking for educational tools.

Also, I got a lot of feedback and this is mandatory to make sure we continue to be focused on the needs of our users.

And of course it gave me a lot of new ideas for GCompris, just need to find some time to code, hopefully when the release 9.4 will be released.

PS: The mug offered by sleducacional to Bruno.

I will be in Brazil at Latinoware 2010 from the 10th to the 12th of November.

It will be a pleasure to meat you there and discuss about the future of GCompris.

This version is a minor update of the 9.2. The main new feature is that we now distribute a MacOSX version (Intel 10.4 and above).

Minor changes

• Fixed superbrain by Julian Gilbey. In some case the proposesed solution was wrong. This is a long lasting bug.
• Added support for MacOSX 10.4 Intel.
• Updated icons to reflect latest art work.
• Removed flags from GCompris. Flags create political issue. There is not always a clear relationship between a country flag and a language.
• Fixed a typo in sudoku tutorial.
• Improved graphism new skins babytoy by Cabaraux Stephane.
• Improved many graphism (connect4, ballcatch) by Cabaraux Stephane.
• Added a copy of gnome-gnuchess internally since the regular gnuchess crashes on macosx. This is activated only on MacOSX.
• Fixed missing translation request for the "Yes I Saw it" string in the reading activity.
• Workaround for the fullscreen mode on macosx. now set a huge max ratio hint when fullscreen is set.
• Added an ongoing progress status at GCompris startup. This is used to avoid the long delay at startup without user feedback.
• Fixed the audio tooltip in the bar.
• Fixed a segfault in the GCompris dialog box.
• New activity lights off by Bruno and Clement Coudoin. Added more simple levels in lightsoff.
• More art work content for photohunter activity Contributed by Marc Levivier Based on paintings by Le Douanier Rousseau.
• Improved wordsgame activity to support language selection.
• Fixed score counting in advanced color
• Now we give 4 chances at each sublevel. After that the sublevel restarts.
• Fixed redraw activity, several level was impossible to complete. There was many colors in the image target that was impossible to do.
• Fixed SDL audio backend to allow playing with effects and no backgroundd music.
• Fixed usa map due to missing rhode island.

Translations added

• Added Traditional Chinese by Chao-Hsiung Liao
• Added asturian translation by Xandru Armesto Fernandez

Translations updated

• Updated French translation by Zohra Coudoin.
• Updated Arabic translation by Khaled Hosny
• Update Chinese (Simplified) translation by Ray Wang
• Updated Galician translations by Fran Dieguez
• Updated Greek translation for gcompris by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Update Czech translation by Marek Cernocky
• Updated Spanish translation by Jorge Gonzalez
• Updated German translation by Mario Blattermann
• Updated Norwegian Nynorsk translation by Karl Ove Hufthammer
• Updated Greek translation for gcomprixogoo by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Updated Basque translation by Inaki Larranaga
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Cernocky
• Updated Swedish translation by Daniel Nylander
• Updated Slovenian translation by Andrej Znidarsic
• Updated russian translation by Slava Dubrovskiy

New feature

• Created a new U.S.A map for our geography activity
• Completed the Windows port. Now use the cute GCompris cursor. Fixed SDL audio back-end

Fixed bugs

• Fixed geography activities. Many dot where missing, hidden by the background.
• Fixed drawn case in the chess activity, it was ending in an infinite loop.
• Improved a little bit the layout in the penalty activity.
• Replaced the yellow by white the text color of the score.
• Now the text dialog is centered in the height.
• Added an API entry to get the current cursor. This allow the help dialog to get the previous cursor, set the default one and change again to the caller one in the end.
• In erase activity, the sponge cursor is setback when exiting the pause state. This allow the about box to set the default cursor which is more suitable.
• In the menu, the display of the description is now centered. Minor change, better layout.
• In python, now import sqlite3 instead of pysqlite2 For backyard compatibility, there is a fall back to sill import pysqlite2.
• Added a missing background to the simple color activity It is based on the artwork of Mathieu Ignacio (from the target activity.)
• Fixed algebra activity to report the level properly.
• Better error checking in case the database cannot be loaded or created. Before that patch, a failure was exiting the startup sequence without warning the user Now, in case we cannot load the database of cannot created it we follow the procedure: - rename the database under the name gcompris_db.broken - recreate it from scratch - we failed again, fall back in no database mode.

Translation

• Updated Arabic translation by Khaled Hosny
• Updated Greek translation by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Updated Greek translation by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• Updated Hungarian translation updated by Gabor Kelemen
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation by Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes
• Updated Russian translation by Андрей Черепанов
• Updated Swedish translation by Daniel Nylander

In short, this release is a bug fix release of the 9.0. It is mandatory for all packager to use this one due to the large number of problems we fixed.

You get the tarball at the usual place on Sourceforge

If you prefer, on the git side, this comes from the ’gcomprixogoo’ branch.

If full, the change log is:

Core fixes

• Added support of Sugar look and feel by Aleksey Lim
• Now the group menus are ordered based on an embedded difficulty level so that they appear in the same order.
• Fixes to compile with GTK 2.19 by Johan Cwiklinski
• Removed unused import rsvg in watercycle and penalty. PACKAGERS: This mean we no more need on python-rsvg.

Activity fixes

• scale Added a sign on the scale The scale activity is sometimes annoying because you cannot easiliy see which side the scale goes. I added a sign < > or = on it to ease the task.
• photo hunter Major rework of he photo hunter activity that can now detect the image difference automagically. This makes it easy to contribute new data set to this activity, just provide it 2 images having some differences. BTW, I added some more content to it. Photo hunter has been fixed to work in full screen and now has an explanation string when started
• erase Fixed events on the canvas that where not taken in account. Now clicking beside the fish does speed them like it was before.
• reversecount Fixed reversecount, it was not restarting on loose case. Now when the children loose he restarts the same level.
• follow line Adapted the follow line to work on touch screen. This was reported by Ronny Standtke. Now not only the motion events are catched but also click events.
• animation activity Added tooltip in the animation activity.
• smallnumber Fixed a crash case in smallnumber activity. This has also been improved to avoid overlaps of dices. Fixed smallnumber2 activity regarding dice pair not close enough.
• electricity Fixed electricity activity, image was referenced badly.
• geography Added translation on tooltips in the geography activity.
• missingletter Fixed missingletter crash uppon changing its locale.
• erase double click Reintroduced the erase double click activity.
• memory word number Fixed memory word number activity. It was broken related to translations.
• smallnumber No more display the sublevel 11/10.
• ball catch Added the manual in the first start of ballcatch.
• traffic Simplified level for traffic. A contribution from a French teacher Sylvain Dechy who teaches in Hérimoncourt. This introduces a set of simplified level in the traffic activity best suited for children.
• tuxpaint Fixed tuxpaint activity. Was completely broken.
• memory sound Now in memory_sound activity the intro is heard.
• melody Added an OK button to start the melody activity. This avoids the intro voice to be skipped.

Translation updates

• Updated Ukrainian translation by Ivan Onyshchuk
• Updated French translation by Bruno Coudoin
• Updated Hungarian translation by Gabor Kelemen
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký
• Updated Simplified Chinese translation by Ray Wang
• Updated Arabic translation by Khaled Hosny
• Updated Afrikaans translation by Friedel Wolff
• Updated Portuguese translation by Duarte Loreto
• Updated Czech translation by Marek Cernocky
• Updated Bulgarian translation by Alexander Shopov
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese by Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes

Voice pack

• Several voices where not played due to name mismatch
• Added a new Chinese voice set read out by Feng Jie and others, translated and post processed by littlebat at http://www.learndiary.com/

After two years of work, the GCompris development team is happy to share with you the release of the version 9.0.

GCompris is almost 10 years old and it required some deep code restructuring. This release brings many mandatory changes to make it easier to enhance, maintain and distribute.

The first major change has been driven by the Sugar community. On the XO there was a need to distribute the activities individually. Since the early days of GCompris, we had properly separated the core engine and the activities but the laters were shared in a single folder. Now each activity in GCompris have a single directory. This includes its code and its data (menu, icon, images, sounds, data set).

Beside allowing per activity distribution, it is also makes it easier to contribute to GCompris, there is even an activity called pythontemplate that can be used as a starting point to create your own.

The second major change has been to replace the old, unmaintained gnome-canvas toolkit by the more modern, Cairo based toolkit named goocanvas. This makes the rendering of GCompris much better, we now have an alpha channel and the antialiasing.

The third change is our skin format that is now fully SVG based and uses the elements IDs. This way creating a skin can be done by editing a single file instead of 70 files.

The last change is the image ratio (width versus height). In the old version we were using 800x600 (4/3) and could only do fullscreen by changing the screen resolution. Now, to accomodate newer monitors, we are using the 800x520 resolution which is wider. But GCompris playing area is not smaller because we managed to replace the big button bar to something more integrated. The full screen is done by rescaling ourself, you can even rescale GCompris in window mode.

A good side effect is that GCompris can be used on big monitor and on smaller devices.

Beside the major changes, there has been a lot of minor changes all around, it would take too many time to report all of them.

At least, I have to mention

• The new graphism from Stephane Cabaraux for the canal lock and water cycle activities.
• The new photo hunter activity by Marc Le Douarain
• More famous paintings by Marc Levivier.
• A full rewrite of the animation activity that allows now editing previous frames at will with a time line.
• A new mode for our scale activity where the children now learn the weight units gram and kilo by Wolfram Sang.
• I you can see, we make a lot of work and now we need your help to report us bugs or send patches to stabilize it.

Thanks to all the contributors and supporters of all kinds who provide help to GCompris.

Windows users, please be patient, I will work on it as soon as the 9.0 is stabilized.

I would like first to apologise towards the Portuguese children and teachers who have faced the translation issue.

A special thanks to our Gnome Portuguese translation team, Duarte Loreto and António Lima. They spent the week-end working on a rework of the translation under the pressure of the bad press we have been facing in some Portugal’s news paper.

GCompris supports over 50 languages and its a community based effort. Yes in some case we may ship incomplete or incorrect translations. We have always considered that we need to start somewhere and that an incomplete translation is better than no translation at all. This has worked pretty well so far because once people sees that the translation is not correct they join the project to improve it.

Over the years, the Gnome Translation team gets stronger but for historical reason I kept the bad custom to release po files myself. I now understand how wrong I was. I call again the Gnome translation team to take over the languages I still commit myself. You can find which in the po/ChangeLog file.

So this is pretty unusual for us to be in the headline. I hope this will calm down so we can go back to what we like to do, help the children learning.

Now the release notes for the 8.4.9

• Fixes to compile on Ubuntu 8.10
• Improved robustness, fixed potential crash cases
• Miguel DE Izarra implemented a word selector. Now the teacher can easily put their own words in the reading and falling word activities.
• Integrated several patches from Vitali Perchonok related to Right to Left languages support.
• Matieu Ignacio: New original background for the target activity.
• Vitali Perchonok provided several images from OpenClipart to replace ours.
• Miguel De Izarra added support for a network mode to let teachers centralise their customisations. This save custom data in user_dir and make a content.txt (a md5sum like file) listing custom files. Simply put this files in a web server to diffuse in classroom. GCompris clients are launched with —server
• Miquel De Izarra Added support for editing the content of the missing letter activity.
• Fixed the empty date field in the admin section on Windows.
• Now properly points use images in My GCompris/Images In the animation activity, the image selector will display all images from this directory.
• gnet library is now enabled by default at compile time.
• Voices in Punjabi by Ankit Sahai

Translation updates

• af.po: Created translation for Afrikaans by Friedel Wolff and Samuel Murray
• bg.po: Updated Bulgarian translation by
• de.po: Updated German translation
• el.po: Updated Greek translation by Yannis Kaskamanidis
• es.po: Updated Spanish translation
• fr.po: Updated French translation.
• he.po: Updated Hebrew translation by Jorge Mariano.
• hu.po: Translation updated.
• ka.po: Updated Georgian translation by Gia Shervashidze.
• nn.po: Updated Norwegian Nynorsk by Karl Ove Hufthammer
• pa.po: Updated Punjabi translation by Ankit Sahai
• pt.po: Updated Portuguese translation by Duarte Loreto and António Lima
• pt_BR.po: Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation.
• sv.po: Updated Swedish translation.
• ta.po: Tamil Translation updated by Tirumurthi Vasudevan