Topic: Vocabulary Trainer

Hey Everybody,

I am new to chumby, Flash and programming - but still I want to make a widget. So it would be great if you could help me.

The idea is the following:

I want to make a Chinese-German/English vocabulary trainer. It should work like this:

As there is a upload limit to 100kb the main data should be online somehow.

1. The Mainscreen should show a Chinese character and on the bottom should be a field where one can check the meaning.
2. The left and right screen areas feature an invisible button if one remembers the word or not.
3. So far so good - you can download the widget - it's called "chinese trainer" but still have to be checked by chumby industries. (the link: http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Chinese%20Trainer ) install it to your chumby to see how it should work - background will be red!


So what I want to do:

I want to build a database like a stylesheet. Each row should feature:

1. Chinese Character
2. PinYin - that's the thing that tells you how to read a word in roman letters.
3. the translation
4. and a ranking according to the times you didn't know or knew the word. (like each time you don't know the word - difficulty increases by 2)

That should be the database - first off each character manually added.

and than the flash program should read out each field and fit it into the program and the screen.

Try to find my submitted widget for easier visualisation aspect ;-)

It would be great if someone could tell me how to work on that or if it isn't that easy to realize...

Thanks,
Malaoshi

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Hmmm ... can anyone at least give me a hint, where I should be looking if I don't get an answer.

Thankful for any advice!
Malaoshi

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

For the database, you'll need a web service that can send those fields to the widget in XML format, probably with the Chinese character sent back as a URL to a image to download from your server.  Look in the FlashLite documentation for the XML class and its load method that allows you to pull data from an external server... start here.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flashlite/3.0 … Ref_1.html

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Great - a start! Thanks for your help. I will try my best and work myself into it ;-)

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

You may want to rasterize the fonts on the server, and download them as graphics.  The alternative is to embed the characters in the SWF itself, which can lead to memory usage problems.

6 (edited by Malaoshi 2010-01-31 06:42:28)

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Thanks. And I think you are right about the memory - chinese fonts tend to be pretty big in file size - so let some tool convert them into a picture would be the solution. Guess there are enough examples out there as I once did it with typo3 so I guess there will be some for flash also!

Right now I will start simple and make a normal flash vocabulary trainer - for training flash issues and then I get back to the one for the chumby as my server skills and flash skills in general are not that good.

But if anyone got some more suggestions it is still appreciated!

I mean - what I want to realize first is to simply read an extern stylesheet (xml or so) and put the required data into the right space in the flash lite application.

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Hi,

I've tried to make the vocabulary trainer. And so far it is working, but I cannot access my xml-file.

How do I make programm use it? Here is my XML-file that needed to be loaded into my flash:

http://chumby.8k.com/vocab.xml

What do I have to do?

Here ist my AS for loading the online file:

XMLdaten.load("http://chumby.8k.com/vocab.xml");

But it doesn't work.

Help!
Thanks,
Malaoshi

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Okay - problem was the crossdomain.xml, fixed that.

http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Chinese%20Trainer

new problem is - how do I convert the characters into a picture, so it can be displayed on the chumby?

Thanks for any help!

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Look at http://www.libgd.org/Font -- gd is a library for generating images from programs, and it includes TrueType font rendering.  It can be run from C or used through bindings to languages like PHP.

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

@unwiredben: Thanks, I will take a look at it!

Re: Vocabulary Trainer

Hi,

another question came up. I managed to embed some font parts. But am still missing the major part - the chinese characters.

I know there is a way to do a fonts.swf and directly upload it to the chumby. That would solve my problem I think, but here my question, how do I do it?

I have been to this site: http://wiki.chumby.com/mediawiki/index. … bstitution

but I don't understand it too much. What am I supposed to do, or how do I get the files onto the chumby?

What I did and what didn't seem to work: I took an usb dongle, put a fonts.swf and a flashplayer.cfg on it.

The flashplayer.cfg content is:

CustomFontMovie /mnt/usb/fonts.swf

--------------------------------
but nothing happened, when I restarted my chumby and tried my widget again. So - any suggestions?
Do I have to make a change in the widget also? I put it to "use device font"