What can you do?

This video teaches that the human will is stronger than any other force.
What can you do?
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9aHT-syZxs

Getting involved in the environment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTwXeZ4GkzI

While watching this video, a ship was installed in my brain. I mean that I, suddenly, understood our world and society from a new perspective ,the language. Also, I learned to what extent our point of view can carry us.

The way we construct our values through our language creates our point of view. We need to know the words we use to create an adequate thesis statement, a thought. Since our language hasn't evolved at the same rate as the technology, we need to be precise and careful with how we refer to others. If not, we can hurt others and make them think they aren't capable human beings. On the other hand, today's technology proves the human capability, that everyone, no matter of his physical conditions,  is capable to achieve his goals. For this, we need to prepare everybody to adapt(our greatest human skill) to the language and thus, to the society.This way, we will open ourselves to diversity and reach the maximum potential of the human will.

Project Usability

In order to measure the usability of our research work, we prepared a virtual machine with the requirements needed to run our scenarios. We are looking for testing: Completion Rates, Usability Problems, Task Time, Task Level Satisfaction, Errors and Expectation. We have not thoroughly researched what the best way to test the usability of our work, so this time, it will work as a pilot test. For more information about the usability method, visit: this blog

We will ask users to do two exercises. Both exercises consist in write a program that calculates the Fibonacci sequence. The difference between them is that the first one will be typing and the other one will be speaking. In both we will measure the time it takes to perform each of them.

C++ scenario and the Composite plugin

I managed to make a scenario in Simon that implements basic C++ keywords and structures via voice recognition. Finding out about the Simon plugin "Composite" was a big help in order to make programming easier. It allows us to execute various commands from different plugins in a specific order. This lets us create an entire block of code and make the cursor go back to where we would normally want to continue writing the code. For instance, by saying "while", we could create this block of code:

while (  ) {
 
}

and make the cursor go back to the parenthesis in order to put the logical condition in. This opens up many other possibilities in terms of navigating and writing code.

By calling the switch text macro, going up two times, activating the "end" key, and going left four times, the cursor will end up inside the switch statement's parenthesis.

Here's the "WHILE" command using the composite plugin.

Since creating your own identifiers and strings is still not supported, variables are limited to being things like: var, index, temp and accum as of right now. With the current available keywords, I was able to open an empty c++ file, program something basic in it, and save it:

It currently doesn't return or do anything, but the simple steps of accumulating the sum of numbers is still there. 

There are still some issues though. Additional spaces and indents will obviously not be recognized by the scenario, and removing them by backspacing time and again is a drag. Additionally, the "undo" command does not work to remove blocks of code you type since Simon types things key by key. A quick solution for this is to make a shift command that holds shift to select the text you want and then backspace it, but it's still not very efficient.

I hope I could explain myself well enough... I'll be making a video explaining everything better and hopefully making a more impressive program with voice recognition and netbeans/eclipse this weekend.

Ongoing

So far we have created Simon’s scenarios that allow us to control different IDE’s such as Netbeans, Sublime, Gedit and others. We have also created scenarios for programming in different programming languages ​​such as C++ and Java. Create these scenarios has been quite straightforward thanks to Simon, but we have identified that we wanted to give some improvement to this software in order to respond to our needs. Because programming itself has a format layout and development structure, implementing innovative features into the keyboard is an integral part of the project and the intended user experience. So, We are now working on some of the Simon's plugins such the Keyboard, the Text Macro and the Shortcuts commands, in order to find a more efficient  way to create an interface that generally works on any IDE. 

Prototype

A rough prototype of a C++ scenario ... hope you like it.

PS : Sorry for my bad english :(

Install Simon successfully on Linux

We are now three students in the team. Each of us has installed Simon successfully on a virtual machine with Kubuntu 13.10. One of the member of the team, Rafael, suggested it as an environment for Simon, because this operative system is based on free software from many communities of developers including KDE software, and Simon needs some requirements from KDE. This makes Kubuntu a better environment to install Simon.

You will need to install these requirements (you can copy and paste the following command):

• sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake gettext gettext-kde kkdeartwork libqwt-dev kdelibs5-dev libxtst-dev libqt4-sql-sqlite libphonon-dev libattica0.4 libattica-dev zlib1g-dev libasound2-dev julius

And then, you can do:

• sudo apt-get install simon simon-data