Features in next version of Parley

[Inge Wallin]

Hi guys,

As you can see this mail is sent to both parley-devel and kde-edu. In the future I will keep 
Parley specific discussions in parley-devel, but I thought that perhaps some people who are 
interested in Parley are not aware of that list. So just this time I will post to both. If you are 
interested, do become a member of the parley-devel list[1].

Now, the actual contents. This mail is a call for features to be put on the TODO list for the 
next version of Parley. 

The last development period which lead up to the just now published Parley 1.1 in KDE 
4.14 focussed greatly on an improved training experience. We added the following bigger 
features among all the small ones:
 - a dashboard to keep track of the status of all collections
 - double directional training
 - sessions

This does not mean that all training features in Parley are "done". But it is at least good 
enough even for serious language learners and I am using it myself daily for my studies.

The focus of the next version will be content generation. This means that we will make an 
overhaul of the editor and add a lot of small features that will make the process of creating 
new collections easier. It will also mean integration of Amarvir Singh's GSoC project "semi-
automatic generation of collections in parley" so that we can speed up the generation of 
collections a lot.

In addition to the above we are also doing two things in parallel:

 - Alexander Xavier has ported Parley to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. This means that it will 
be ready for the next generation of KDE platforms. It also means easier porting to other 
platforms like Windows, MacOSX and Android. This will be the future platform for Parley 
and it will be ready for the upcoming version.

 - The KDE Edu group is currently specifying a new file format for collections. This will be a 
common format for all KDE Edu language applications, including Artikulate, and the 
applications for younger users such as KHangman. We also hope that we will get GCompris 
with us but this is not yet decided.

This new file format will allow pictures, sound and other forms of media to be collected into 
one file that is easier to distribute than a kvtml file with lots of picture files. It will also allow 
better statistics and more varied training methods.

The new file format is unlikely to be ready for the next version but it is possible that we can 
implement it in Parley for the version after that.

But which specific features do you want? I want to take this opportunity to let developers 
and users come up with ideas that we can collect and choose between. Please answer as 
followups to this mail. I will collect them all and put them into the TODO file and then make 
some sort of priority list.

I will also put this text on the KDE forums which are perhaps read by people who are not 
members of any mailing lists. 

	-Inge

[1] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/parley-devel

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