LeMill blog

Another release done on time. For 1.4 we concentrated on getting all bugs fixed, and that we did. Unfortunately Hans kept generating new ones, so some known problems still exist. Happily nothing serious. Main new things are Russian translation, partial Lithuanian translation, multilingual support in the PILOT player, revamped user profiles and such.

We’ll be doing one more release this year, and that’s in two weeks, just before the annual project review. Then we’ll take a breather and do some long range planing on what we want LeMill to do in 10 months time. We should by then also have some feedback from the teachers that are being trained to use the system (today 40 teachers were in a full day workshop in the Czech Republic). Just a few days ago we got some heuristic usability results from our Norwegian partners, and fixed some issues already for this release. More will follow.

(Originally posted at le group)

It’s been too long since our last development sprint, but this week is a sprint week. The Estonian developers split up, with two of them joining the Hungarians in Budapest, and one of them joining us here in Helsinki, Finland. We have a release in four days, and from our previous experiences with colocated sprints, we should have quite good progress during this week.

During this year I’ve really seen how challenging a dispersed development project is. Even though we’ve stayed on schedule, our efficiency would be many times greater if we all worked in the same room. Never mind the integrated development site, IRC, mailing lists, FlashMeetings, Skype, and whatnot, they don’t replace working side-by-side.

(Originally posted at le group)

Version 1.3 (codenamed Tijl Uilenspiegel) was released today. This is another cleanup release, with loads of usability and technical fixes, but not that much new stuff. I’m getting a bit anxious that we’re only doing bug fixes and not creating new stuff, but then again, getting the system to work correctly is of course a high priority goal.

From the user’s point of view the new feature of course is the PILOT learning resource type, which allows you to do rich media slideshows, which are designed for progressive inquiry learning. From the technical perspective this is nothing new, since it’s been available for a month now, but we just now got the critical bugs fixed from it.

For the next release we should finally have some improvements to the community section, which is still very much underdeveloped and underdesigned.

(Originally posted at le group)

We have finally stabilized the user interface of LeMill enough to start translations - version 1.2 was released last week. Today we sent the UI translation files to our project partners, who will translate the user interface to Czech, German, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Slovenian. The UI is already translated into English, Finnish, and Estonian. If anyone wishes to contribute a translation to any other language, we have instructions.

(Originally posted at le group)