[Squeakland] Keyboard support for eToys?
Ned Konz
ned at bike-nomad.com
Thu Dec 23 20:27:08 UTC 2004
On Tuesday 21 December 2004 2:12 am, Marcus Denker wrote:
> On the german list the question came up about etoys and keyboard
> support.
>
> Is it possible to e.g. control the car with the keyboard?
Interesting you ask that. I made a project that shows just that. You can get
it at:
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/DriveUsingKeyboard.002.pr
but be sure you have the keystroke fix loaded first. This is in the Squeakland
update stream (just "get updates"), but you can also get it at:
http://squeakalpha.org/updates/0377enableKeystrokeEvent-nk.cs
> I searched
> the list,
> and in 2002 Karl Ramberg posted an enhancement (etoy keystroke.5.cs).
>
> Has this (or something similar) been added to etoys in the meantime?
Yes. I have added simple (keystroke based) support for keys to the current
Squeakland image, and have posted a fix CS to the Squeak-dev list that makes
the (existing) support work with the current version work with Squeak 3.8.
Here is an excerpt from a message that I posted to the Squeakland list on 13
December (I also posted a similar one to Squeak-dev on the 14th).
--
There are two parts:
* The World has a String-valued property called 'lastKeystroke'. This is a
string that holds the keystroke, in a form that can be used in string
comparisons, like:
'a'
'<left>'
'<Ctrl-left>'
So you can have a ticking script (for instance) testing the
lastKeystroke property. But you may very well miss one, unless you use the
other part:
* You can trigger a script that is owned by the World on a 'keyStroke' event.
You do this by clicking on the 'when this script should run' button, and
choosing 'more' and then 'keyStroke'.
--
Since that time I posted the fix I mentioned.
Note that this does *not* do keyUp/keyDown events, just keystrokes. So if you
want to, say, have the rocket thrusting while a key is down, that's not
currently supported.
What I had intended to do is to provide a KeyMorph and perhaps also a
KeyboardMorph that could provide this kind of support. The keystroke support
that I added recently is much more modest, and doesn't suffer from the
problems of different keyboard maps.
The problem is that the keyDown/keyUp events are not associated with any
meaning when they come in. So depending on what keyboard you have, several
different physical keys (and hence keycodes) may generate, say, the "1"
keystroke. And this will differ by physical keyboard, operating system, etc.
When we get a keyUp event, we also ask the operating system how to interpret
that key code number as a keystroke. But until that time we just know the
number.
I couldn't think of an easy way to deal with this problem in a cross-platform
way, and I didn't want to make it so that people could make projects that
couldn't easily be shared between different computers.
I am open to suggestions as to how to fix this. One idea I had was to learn
the relationship: upon loading a project that uses particular keys, the
KeyMorphs wouldn't know what numeric keycodes they needed to respond to. But
they would know the keyStroke (like <left>). By watching *all* the
keyUp/keyDown/keyStroke events (assuming the user is just pressing one key at
once, and there are no combining or modifier keys also being used), we can
see the correspondence between the keyUp events and the keyStroke events that
follow.
Perhaps the KeyMorphs, upon being loaded or created, would prompt the user to
press the given key so they could learn. Perhaps they could just not respond
until the second press of their given key.
As I noted above, this is complicated by:
* modifier keys
* combining keys and key sequences
* sticky key states (Shift-Lock, Caps-Lock, Num-Lock, etc.)
* chording: pressing multiple non-modifier keys at once
* international input methods that may compress a long sequence of keys into
one keystroke
> Another interesting question we got on the list (by a very motivated
> teacher):
> How to extend eToys. The teacher would like to build an eToy based
> environment for teaching math to older kids, and he would like to
> provide
> some pre-defined tiles.
It is easy to add vocabulary items to Morph classes, and probably not as easy
to extend (say) Number operations. For instance, I don't know how you'd add
unary Number operators like sin and cos.
> I think this view of eToys as a framework for building curriculums is
> quite
> interesting, but there is no documentation about how to do "etoy"
> Metaprogramming...
From a recent message that I wrote to the Squeak-dev list:
To extend the vocabulary of a Morph, you can just add methods named like
additionsToVocabularyCategory* to the class side (look for such methods to
get an idea). For each item, you typically need a method in Player and the
corresponding method(s) in your Morph class.
For example, here is Morph class >>
additionsToViewerCategoryLayout
"Answer viewer additions for the 'layout' category"
^#(
layout
(
(slot clipSubmorphs 'Whether or not to clip my submorphs' Boolean readWrite
Player getClipSubmorphs Player setClipSubmorphs:)
))
So this adds the 'clipSubmorphs' slot to the 'layout' vocabulary category.
That slot (a pseudo-variable) is read/write, and is implemented by the
methods #getClipSubmorphs and #setClipSubmorphs on Player. Those methods just
call back to the morph that is the Player's costume:
Player>>getClipSubmorphs
"Getter for costume's clipSubmorphs"
^ costume renderedMorph clipSubmorphs
The other kind of thing you can add (besides the pseudo-variable 'slot' type)
is the 'command' type, as in:
additionsToViewerCategoryMiscellaneous
"Answer viewer additions for the 'miscellaneous' category"
^#(
miscellaneous
(
(command doMenuItem: 'do the menu item' Menu)
(command show 'make the object visible')
These don't have an associated return value, but they can have a single typed
parameter.
I don't know where the best place for this kind of documentation would be. Do
we have a Squeakland Swiki set up, or would the Squeak Swiki be the best
place for this?
--
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
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