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:
On the translation side:
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:
On the translation side:
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:
Improved activities:
... 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:
On the translation side:
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:
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:
And a lot of new features:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Other changes:
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:
We always have new features, content and 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:
Activities modified to run with software rendering:
You can find this new version here:
The new version is available in the Android store
Windows 32bit or Windows 64bit version
Windows 32bit - No OpenGL or Windows 64bit - No OpenGL version
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
For all downloads: md5sums
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:
We always have new features and bug fixes:
You can find this new version here:
The new version is available in the Android store
Windows 32bit or Windows 64bit version
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
For all downloads: md5sums
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:
We always have new features and bug fixes:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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).
Norwegian Nynorsk (Karl Ove Hufthammer), Italian (Vincenzo Reale), Catalan (Antoni Bella Pérez), British English.
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.
One year ago we made the hard decision to fully rewrite GCompris in QtQuick in order to address tablet users while keeping PC compatibility. As you can imagine it is a daunting task and something for sure that cannot be done alone. Thanks to the help of the many contributors who joined the project we have been able to port 86 activities out of the 140 of the legacy version in a year. See the status report. We hope to complete the port in the coming year. We continue to polish the new version every day but we already provide a better user experience than the legacy version.
We would like to take this opportunity to thanks the KDE community at large who took us under its cute umbrella and allowed us to attract numerous contributors, developers, translators and provided us development support.
Some numbers, within a year GCompris had 1211 commits made by 19 contributors representing 34000 lines of code plus the 8 KDE translation teams who reached 100% (Ukrainian, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, French, Dutch, Chinese Simplified and Brazilian Portuguese).
As you will see, the full Android version is sold for 6€ now but the price will have to be adjusted to find the optimal one. Software development is a lot of work, paying for GCompris is a good way to reward us and give us the opportunity to sustain the development on our beloved project. Another very easy way to help us is to share the news and rate us on Google play.
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..
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.
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.
The main requirements for me was to be able to have a single code base that would let us target the main desktops and the main tablets.
After looking at different options, I settled on Qt Quick. It is a modern toolkit based on a novative descriptive language called QML that let you describe the user interface, javascript that complement it to code the game logic. It is also possible to develop the non graphical part of the application in C++ with Qt.
It is based on an OpenGL scene graph, we can create shader and particles to make graphical effects and do smooth animations.
In order to validate this choice, I did a prototype and this convinced me that it was a pertinent choice for GCompris. Even if this is a new technology, the learning curve is acceptable, with very few code you can create a very good looking activitiy. In my test it takes about half the lines of code to make the same activity in Qt Quick than we used to in Python and we get a better graphical quality.
The bad news is that it is not compatible with the current version of GCompris and it requires a full rewrite. All we can keep is the game logic and tuning, the texts, the translations, the graphics and the sounds.
I just published the GCompris-qt version on GitHub and updated our development page to give some starting points to build it yourself.
For those who don't want to compile it, you can look at the little video.
Another important point, since this is not based on Gtk+ this new version cannot be hosted by Gnome as we used to do. Therefore we cannot participate in the Google Summer of Code under the Gnome umbrella. I thus registered GCompris for this year session of GSoC and Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes accepted to be the official co-mentor.
If you are interested in helping GCompris, I encourage you to learn Qt Quick and to help port some activities. This is a good opportunity to learn a new technology while doing something useful. I still have to refine and document the process to create a new activity but it is not very complex.
GCompris on Gtk+ has been around for 14 years. It is true that the migration will take time, probably several years but this is something we have to do if we want to stay relevant in the coming years.
Bruno.
Look at the translation status here.
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.
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.
As for each release, many translation have been updated
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).
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:
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.
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.