PhET Progress Report
Jan 3, 2008
An online version of this report is available here.
Here’s a pie chart representation of the time distribution.
This report covers 12-18-2007 through 1-3-2008
Rotation
· Rewrote platform graphics to improve depth view
· Misc bugfixes and UI improvements
· Momentum is conserved under a change of moment of inertia
· Still have some remaining to-do’s
· Change units back to meters?
Hiring
· Updated job application webpage & location
· Wrote and deployed a launcher for submissions
· Discussed with Chris
· Evaluated 10 submissions, pared down to 4
Translation
· Integrated a few translations (Greek, Portuguese)
· Postponed work on translation integration
· Recommendation for translation process:
1. Post a JAR containing all translatable simulations (20 MB or so)
2. Automatically update this JAR file frequently (once a day/once a week)
3. Translations are based on this JAR.
4. When a translation is received, add it to the main site JAR (may be some discrepancies for submitted translation until main site sim is redeployed).
· This solves the following problems:
1. multiple copies of common strings, and being able to test them in all simulations
2. making it easy for translators to access several simulations and
3. making sure that all translators are working on the latest version of strings instead of (potentially) stale main-site jars.
· Should pare down full translation synchronization, just accommodate “add-new-translation” function
· Needs more testing, improvements for uploading, and some rewriting
Build Process
· Posted all-sim jar to dev
· Build succeeds/build-all-sim-jar succeeds
Moving Man
· Moved forces-1d and ramps to moving man project folder for consolidation
· Trial implementation for drawing graphs
· Added derivative and integration for timeseries
Misc
·
SVG: improved graphics transform code
·
3D: looked for suitable 3d implementations for
use in rotation and other sims
o
JOGL/LWGL would work great over web start, but problematic
for offline usage as a single jar. Also,
file sizes are probably large, and proguard may not
work for JNI bindings.
o
Other solutions have a problem due to license (some
also require Java 1.5+)
o
Solutions other than the above are not strong
enough for usage (either not mature enough or not complete enough)
·
PhET Help
Upcoming Work
· John’s resignation
o Transfer of knowledge
o Hiring process
· Rotation/Torque
· CCK
o Organize requests into unfuddle
o Bugfixes
· Continue developing Moving Man, Force1D, Ramp with new common libraries, (with Chris/John)
· Add “draw-in-graph to create” function for moving-man.
· Moving man basically complete, start on Ramps next, and use that as the basis for Force1D
· Generate better reports from Unfuddle/identify ticket times in unfuddle
See
also Unfuddle for detailed remaining work.
