Need input in prioritizing ToonTalk enhancements

Hi all.

During the meeting this morning we agreed that the following
enhancements should be made to ToonTalk if time permits. Any
enhancements will either be made by June 15 (to allow for more than 2
months of testing with an unchanging release) or will be made in the
fall after the August 31st release. I need help deciding which
enhancements I should try to add by June 15 and which ones to postpone.
Let me know if you have strong feelings about any of these.

The list roughly in the order we talked about them are

1. Flipped pictures will have an area at the bottom for a label (much
like the labels of boxes) that will have an thumbnail image of the other
side at the corner. You can type a label while pointing to it. Note that
these labels will not support translation as text pads do.

2. Editing while holding text pads and number pads. There are 2 parts of
this. One is the addition of an insertion point that you can change with
the arrow keys. This means you can move back, rubout part, and insert
new characters or digits. The second change is that ToonTalk will allow
any changes to a number pad while being held. For example if you are
holding 0 you can type - and get -0. If you then type 5 you get -5. If
instead you drop it the -0 in converted to 0 at that point. If you are
holding a number with robots on the back or a sensor then this ability
to type intermediate syntactically incorrect values will only work if it
is turned off. This scheme subsumes the earlier proposal to have an edit
text box on the Pause dialog.

3. Use of multiple threads internally within ToonTalk. The most
immediate and least disruptive use of this is to make foreign birds much
easier to use since ToonTalk won't freeze while the code implementing a
foreign bird is running. It could also be applied to many other
situations where ToonTalk pauses -- e.g. accessing files or the web or
to some extent when recording time travel. This may well introduce bugs
so will be activated only if enabled via the toontalk.ini file.

4. A nest given to a bird is accepted and it acts as if the nest had
been dropped on the receiving nest hence combining them. May cause
problems so will be enabled via toontalk.ini. Should significantly
simplify the connecting of tools with a bird/nest interface.

5. Enhanced long-distance birds. This will enabled them to get through
firewalls and to work even if the nest is moved or copied. Too big a job
for the June 15 deadline.

6. Performance improvements to make time travel pause for much shorter
periods. This is the major shortcoming for using time travel now.

7. No discussion of the publishing tool during our meeting. This is a
separate executable that can be done after the June 15 freeze.

======

8. We discussed user-defined sensors and decided to give that low
priority. Other sensor enhancements as well.

9. No discussion of scheduler bias maybe because the new way that robots
move on the floor fixes some of this problem.

------------------

Best,

-ken






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