WeSay Development Progress

The Eee is, so far, the best selling of the new wave of “4P” computers; laptops which are characterized by low Price, adequate Performance, portability, and low electrical Power requirements.  Now, this is no OLPC; it costs around $500 and isn’t as rugged. It does not aim at the same ultra-low power usage. But it does have two things over the OLPC today: you can buy them on Amazon and you can get them with Windows XP.  (Yes, sadly we’re still waiting on some open source pieces to mature on the Linux side before we can get WeSay running on the OLPC and other Linux boxes).

So, how would WeSay run on this relatively slow (900 Mhz), relatively low-wattage machine?  Getting Windows installed and running, the Eee felt very sluggish.  Because of delays, I found it easy to make errors when using a web browser.  Very slowly, I grabbed .net 3.5 sp1, then WeSay build 1451.  Very slowly, I ran the installer.  By this time, I wasn’t expecting to have a happy WeSay experience.

To my surprise, WeSay runs GREAT on this box! Changing records, finding words, and bringing up new tasks were all pretty snappy.

Note: I only did a quick walk-through using the sample data, so please don’t go out and purchase a hundred Eee’s to run WeSay based on this blog post.

One of the last big features for version 1 of WeSay has been in a for while.  Someone (I won’t mention any names) did a great job on it but didn’t blog about it.  So I’ll see if I can do it justice.

In this screen shot we see the three ways you can now specify sorting:

Sort like another language

If the text sorts just like some major language, just select that language in the list and you’re done.

Custom Simple

Many languages based on Latin characters introduce a small number of "special characters" used to represent sounds not covered by A-Z, like a barred i. In these situations, you can specify the rules just like you do in many existing apps, like Toolbox and Lexique Pro. When you choose "custom simple", the rules box is filled with rules needed to sort English. You can enter vernacular works in the "Test Sort" area:

We want the barred-i to sort just after i, so we add it to the rules and click the button:

Normally, these secondary distinctions are enough.  But for some languages, tertiary distinctions are needed. We get these in the simple rules by using parentheses. Consider this list of words:

Now, imagine we want the upper-case words to sort together.  We need to add in another level of distinction, so that case can trump the accents.  We do this by adding parentheses around all case pairs, and putting the two sets of e’s on the same line:

Eric has written up the details on our wiki.

Custom ICU rules

For languages that need them, WeSay also supports ICU tailorings, which look like this:

& C < č <<< Č < ć <<< Ć   –for Serbian (Latin) or Croatian

Like many features of WeSay, this simple-to-advanced collating actually lives in our "Palaso Library", which is of course open-source and can be included in other programs.  Thus we foresee a day soon when the setup you do in one program (e.g. WeSay) will be trivially usable in other language-development tools.

Happy sorting!

One of the benefits of being stuck at home recovering from Dengue Fever is I feel like it’s ok to splurge a bit on stuff that I want to do, rather than have to do.

For example, while we have always put a lot of effort into keeping WeSay clean and easy, its companion WeSay Configuration Tool has always been about being just-functional-enough-to-get-by.

So I spent two days remodeling it, trying to get it clean and easier to navigate. Here’s the before:

(click to see full size)

and after:

Yes, lacking any artistic ability myself, I’ve ripped off a bunch of open-source Tango icons, tweaked them with the indispensable InkScape, and otherwise copied the latest Skype’s options dialog. There are still quite a number of rough edges in there, but this was a good step.