[kde-edu]: New KTouch version...

[Andreas Nicolai]

Hi folks,

I'd like to announce a new KTouch version (so far the last in the KDE 3.5 
series) available on the source forge page: http://ktouch.sourceforge.net

I won't be able to contribute much until summer, but if you find the time to 
download and try it out, I would like to collect some opinions and 
suggestions regarding:

- what should be improved to make it better usable for children
- what features are missing (see list below for planned features)
- compared to other touch typing programs, what are the shortcomings of 
KTouch?
- what do you think about the lectures? How could they be improved?
- KTouch typing games: what kind of games can you think of (I had a few 
suggestions already, see below)


As a small info ahead, here are the features I plan to have in KTouch 2.0 
which will be in KDE4:

- better keyboard drawing engine to support different keyboard 
layouts/character sets, also more keys can be printed on each key

- progressive build-up of the keyboard: only the keys that are known in the 
current level are drawn colored, others are still grey (thus helping kids to 
focus on the keys they should know so far)

- games:
ballon game: ballons with character draw on them fly up, press the correct 
             key and ***bang*** 
block game: single colored blocks with characters fall down the screen in a
            grid, pressing keys with the characteds makes blocks dissappear,
            press them in a correct order to align 4 blocks of the same color
            to get extra points

- tests: for school kids and teachers, you can setup a test by defining the 
text to type (lecture and levels), and an optional time limit - during the 
test you cannot change settings like auto-level-advance or manual-level 
advance or anything else (to avoid cheating and give teachers the means to 
evaluate kids)


Feel free to send me mails with you suggestions or post them on the list or 
file feature request... I would like to get KTouch as good as possible for 
the KDE4 release.

Andreas