Re: gbrainy & GNOME games

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008, Jordi Mas wrote:

> Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:57:06 +0100
> From: Jordi Mas <jmas softcatala org>
> To: games-list gnome org
> Subject: gbrainy & GNOME games
>
> Hello,
>
> For the last six months I have been working on gbrainy[1], a brain

I noticed Gbraining very early on from your Planet Gnome posts.  It is
always good when games can serve an educational purpose, even if it is
something as simple as training users in basic keyboard skills or
familiarising them with concepts such as drag and drop, or pie menus, and
to turn a learning challenge into something more fun.  It is great that
you have decided to create such an educational game using GTK.

Gnome Games does not yet include Mono.  On that basis I assumed it was
unlikely to become part of Gnome Games and restrained myself from
expressing my dismay at the choice of name with a g- prefix.  Very old
school.

Long term maintainance of games has been a problem and Gnome Games will
need to continue to support games like Aisleriot for a very long time.
The maintainers may feel it is worth including gbrainy but given the past
problems and the need to dump several unmaintained games I would be
suprised if they took that step just yet ... but you never know.

In case they do decide to risk including gbrainy here follows a short
critique:

the website:
http://live.gnome.org/gbrainy

> Requirements
> Love and patient

that should be
"Love and patience"
the concept rather than a person in hospital.


You have used your own custom icons for actions such as endgame (stop) end
program (close/quit) and I would be concerned about the negative impact
this would have on accessibility compared to using standard items where
the icons would change to match the users theme.

Looking at the Answer Bar at the bottom of the game window I notice a
problem.  Gnome use OK with a capital K not lowercase, but again this is a
symptom of not using GTK Stock items.  Using the stock items correctly not
only helps with theming it also means that a lot of the basic will get
automatically translated for you too, taking advantage of all the work
that has already been done to translate GTK.
Doesn't look like you have used stock items for the menus either.

You use the label "Questions" but only one question is shown at a time
(far as I can tell) so it seems "Question" would make more sense.  (I
could interpret the label to mean the space where the questions will
appear but since only one question appears at a time this doesn't make as
much sense to me.)
You use the label "Your answer", I think the impersonal "Answer" would
be more in keeping with Gnome (although you would need to put in a comment
for translators to make it clear you mean Answer as a noun and not a
verb.)


Hope that helps, all I have time for, for now.

-- 
Alan