Arabic unrest prediction – interactive data exploration by The Economist

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/media/2011InfoG/Interactive/ShoeThrowers0314/main.swf

Try IE9 with HTML5 showcases from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple

Since IE9 final version is being released today (http://www.beautyoftheweb.com), here are some HTML5 showcases from different browser makers to test it out against:

• Microsoft: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive
• Mozilla: https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US
• Google: http://www.html5rocks.com / http://studio.html5rocks.com
• Apple: http://www.apple.com/html5

Could even try some of Google’s Chrome specific demos in case they work with IE9 too: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

 

IE9 RC (Release Candidate) wasn’t fully HTML5 compliant last time tested mind you, but neither the other browsers were as you can see at W3C tests:

http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/Testing

IE9 is way better though than IE8: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

Can also see lots of HTML5 tests for browsers at: http://html5demos.com/

 

BTW, it is very interesting that IE9 also supports the WOFF format (Web Open Font Format). Typeface lovers can drool freely here: http://lostworldsfairs.com/

 

Here’s a relevant post with nice video of Mozilla’s showcase: http://techtimely.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/html5-showcase-demos/

 

So should we start drooling on future WebGL support in the browsers’ world too now?

http://techtimely.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/webgl-1-0-specification-releasedwebcl-coming/

(see video at that post and find more WebGL apps at http://learningwebgl.com/blog/)

Running E-Slate (Αβάκιο) on Windows 7 and Vista

For those who wonder what E-Slate is, it’s a componentized authoring environment for the creation of (interactive) educational microworlds, see my previous post for more info.

As I mentioned at that post, the latest official version (ignoring any unofficial / experimental versions that you might find around at some educational research labs’ websites) doesn’t work out of the box on Windows Vista and Windows 7, so below I provide some easy steps to make it work there too.

First of all, you navigate to http://e-slate.cti.gr with your web browser.

The you follow the download link on the left and locate the English and Greek installation files for Windows.

Note that the official version was never released for the Mac (although we had working prototypes running on both MacOS and MacOS-X), cause at the time Apple’s own JVM (MRJ) had serious issues (if I remember well they’ve moved on by now to use the official Java code under the hood). Some RA.CTI team has even recently made it to run one of the latest experimental E-Slate versions on Linux too (full source-code is now available with these latest versions).

 

Note that the installer also installs documentation, source code for the code parts and components that were OpenSource at that time (e.g. the Logo scripting engine) and several demo microworlds. However you can download more microworlds from the “microworlds” link on the left.

 

Then you download and run the appropriate installer (English or Greek, so that you get localized content in the demo microworlds). Do accept/allow at any security prompts for the installer to function properly.

 

Follow all the steps at the installer (just press Next etc.) and just press OK at the following dialog to ignore it (the URL provided is broken by now with Sun Microsystems having been acquired by Oracle and anyway Java 1.3 is quite old [there’s 1.6+ now]).

You should instead install the latest Java Virtual Machine (JVM) from http://www.java.com

 

After these steps, you have to fix E-Slate launcher to work with administrator rights if UAC (User Access Control) is enabled on Windows Vista or Windows 7 (which is the default setting), or if the current user doesn’t have administrator rights (you’ll be asked for the administrator password in that case when you do that setting change). So right click the E-Slate shortcut (“Αβάκιο” if you installed the Greek version) on the desktop and select “Properties”.

At the properties dialog displayed, click the “Compatibility” tab and then select “Run this program as an administrator” and press “OK”.

From then on you’ll be able to either click an E-Slate shortcut to launch the E-Slate Container (the editor) or double-click a .MWD file (an E-Slate Microworld storage file) to open that microworld in the E-Slate Container. Make sure you reply “Yes” to the

The 1st time you launch E-Slate you’ll see a dialog like the following popup, to select the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to use with E-Slate (assuming you did install Java from http://www.java.com). Make sure you select the greatest version (there are some duplicate entries there due to recent changes on how JVMs register themselves with the system – those that have the same “in …” part at the end are equivalent).

The E-Slate launcher will remember this selection in the future, unless it can’t find the JVM you had selected anymore. To select another JVM make sure you hold down CTRL key when launching E-Slate (e.g. can press CTRL+OK at the security prompt Windows UAC shows when you run E-Slate with administrator privileges or hold CTRL when double-clicking a .MWD file or an E-Slate shortcut if you are running it using an administrator account and UAC is disabled).

The above instructions also apply to software based on the E-Slate environment, like the fine education software GAIA II I had built together with several educational and research partners from Greece. If you have any problems, just drop a question at the comments section. Will be glad to help…

E-Slate – educational microworlds authoring componentized environment

E-Slate (http://e-slate.cti.gr) is an exploratory learning environment. It provides a workbench for creating highly dynamic software with rich functionality, even by non-programmers.

Educational activity ideas can be turned into software, with minimal authoring effort, in the form of interactive Microworlds which contain specially designed educational components.

E-Slate components are provided as a kit of pre-fabricated, interoperable computational objects. Software Microworlds can be very easily constructed by plugging components in various configurations.

The behaviour of both components and Microworlds, can be programmed in a Logo scripting language dialect.

Most recent E-Slate version is implemented in Java (had been implemented on OpenDoc / C++ on both MacOS and Windows originally, till Apple pulled the plug from OpenDoc on MacOS (and IBM followed with OpenDoc for Windows) and the components are implemented as JavaBeans.

Special E-Slate software interfaces are available for the components to optionally implement in order to have higher integration with the E-Slate features like dataflow and interface-based pairing via visual Plugs (wiring), however other functionality like structured storage (storing of the microworld and components and sub-objects’ state in a single file) are offered via standard Java APIs like the ones for object serialization and externalization.

The Logo engine used is the OpenSource TurtleTracks Logo by Daniel Azuma (PhD student of Brian Harvey) with extensions of mine for Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts (TELL/ASK/EACH/TELLALL) and for free mixing of English and localized primitives (based on dynamically loaded/unloaded dictionaries for each component inserted/removed at a microworld and for the microworld/environment itself).

I was one of the main members of the team who designed & built E-Slate (did the Logo scripting API and lots of the components, specifically Logo, Canvas, Turtle, Slider, 2D Slider, Stage, TV and Browser) and many microworlds with it, so I guess I should take the time in a follow-up post to explain how to run the latest official version of E-Slate on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista too).

Note that there are some newer versions of E-Slate around on the web, but not all are guaranteed to be backwards compatible with existing microworlds files and have never been released officially through the E-Slate download page (the site is unfortunately not maintained currently by RA.CTI since the original team isn’t around anymore – some formed Talent.gr and put their work into Cruiser, while I took the freelancing route with Zoomicon.com).