[gcompris-devel] Release 9.0 ... Finally.

[Bruno Coudoin]

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 needed to make some deep code
restructuring. This release brings many mandatory changes to make it
easier to enhance, maintain and distribute GCompris.

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 these.

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.

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

To give an idea of the changes, you may want to look a an old and a new
version of our clock activity:
http://gcompris.net/IMG/jpg/old_clock.jpg
http://gcompris.net/IMG/jpg/new_clock.jpg


-- 
Bruno Coudoin
http://gcompris.net  Free educational software for kids
http://toulibre.org  Logiciel Libre à Toulouse
http://april.org     Promouvoir et défendre le Logiciel Libre