We’re getting close to shipping Sophie. Here is a page with some tutorials we set up for Ross High School. They show what I’ve been working on for some time now:

Sophie

Wow that was fast. I’m not sure how much VeryVito actually used Sophie, but he nailed it on the head - We’re making a tool for you. Wait until he sees 2.0

We have released Sophie Early Release RC6, our open source book authoring tool. Sophie has come a long way and we’re not done by a long shot. Take a look!

The software is still beta, so there are bugs, but we’re fixing them as fast as we can. Your input is very valuable to us!

A little demo of associating actions with frames in Sophie (Soon to be RC3)

Watch

Bert has gotten Sophie running on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) hardware (which runs linux). Performance is not great, but that can come later.

Pretty exciting for such complex software running on such affordable hardware. I wonder how Michael’s anti-aliased text works?

Read About Sophie on OLPC

And Bert’s original post here

My job has been hectic for over a year, with schedules missed, money tight, etc. Things are coming to a head, one way or the other, but the work remains interesting and exciting.

Today, I took a list of must-have fixes and got my two done. Not only that, but in the process, sped movie playback up 70% by eliminating a lot of extra processing and also fixing some glaring bugs.

It is interesting how projects go from cobbled up demos to real code - For me over the last year, I’ve learned that documenting your intentions - What you mean to do, verus relying on the code to speak for itself is essential. The code lies far too often - Either because of a bug, or a rushed demo, etc. Self documenting code forces the engineer reading the code to infer what you meant, and this often leads to even more headaches and time lost.

So I’m going to start documenting my code much more. I was thinking - Wouldn’t it be nice if we had line-by-line comment source control? meaning, you could comment a line of code, and have it disappear. These comments would follow the code through cut/paste, etc, and could be shown via tooltip or some other UI.

I have no idea how to implement this in a text based world, but it sure is intriguing to me. Often engineers say they hate reading through the comments, but if you could comment, have it disappear but always refer to it later, I think we’d end up with much better code.

As for me, having my movies on thumbnails code I wrote in June but could not use until my movie rework was done in December just work was quite satisfying. And now that movies play across pages and while resizing is a really nice end to my day.