[gcompris-devel] Making GCompris sound more Musical - Weekly Report 1

[Karthik Subramanian]

Hello all!,

After all the GSoC partying, getting relieved from exams, I started my work
on GCompris. Out of the several activities I proposed I started with the
most simple one - Rhymes-activity which allows the user to view and listen
to rhymes. I got the set of rhymes to be used by searching all through
wikipedia. Then I asked my friends with sweet voices to sing those rhymes
and I recorded them. Though the quality wasn't so good, I used audacity to
get rid of the noise and and tried to improve the quality.

*Before the first week*
I had already set up the new git account, learnt git thoroughly and opened a
new branch to push my code. I went through many activities and learnt the
structure of a typical python code, where to place resources, the path, xml
file, how to execute a single activity using runit.sh and create a new
activity using createit.sh.

*The First Week*
As I started with the rhymes-activity, I used the pygoocanvas API to place
images, text on the GComprisBoard. I got the Icons and Pictures from open
source websites like the openclipart.org. Used GIMP to do the intermediate
effects and editing. Am planning to draw a few images myself, lets see how
it turns out to be. The first page shows the list of rhymes available (Their
icons and name below), on clicking the icon one can view the rhyme. To
handle the events I used the obj.connect() function. I've made it modular -
Have written a single function which handles the request of any rhyme
clicked.

*Task Completed : *I've finished designing the page and also the most
important part of the code which handles events.

*To be completed in this activity : *Finish rendering the music for each
activity, test the code thoroughly.

*Issues faced* : As the rhymes were only a few lines long, I was thinking
whether to store them in a separate file or store them in local variables.
Resolved this issue after discussing with my mentor.

*Screenshot : *http://imgur.com/EBtbc

*Code : *
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gcompris/commit/?h=gcomprismusic&id=f8b1b96ae6a65497d441643defc5a87ac0e97d0b

*Branch : *gcomprismusic

Thanks & am loving this work,
*Karthik Subramanian
GSoC 2011, GNOME
+91 99401 38729
http://tedxssn.com
http://yeskarthik.tumblr.com
twitter.com/yeskarthik <http://twittter.com/yeskarthik>
Be Happy always!! :)
Chennai
*