Making GCompris sound more Musical - Weekly Report 1

[Karthik S <itskarthik s gmail com>]

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

Be Happy always!! :)
Chennai