July Update – The run-up to release

It has been a long month and though patrons have been given sneak peeks to what we’ve been working on, It’ll be great to show everyone what we’ve managed to accomplish these last few weeks and months.

N.B: All my development things are packed away preparing for a move so I’ll add screenshots where relevant by 18/07/24.

Lingonaut Virtualisation on PC – Creatonaut 1.2.0

The latest new Creatonaut update is bigger than all of the previous put together, and is something we’re extremely proud of. When we began work on Creatonaut we promised that volunteers would be able to see how their course contents might look like within Lingonaut on an actual device.

However, after numerous rewrites and hours of code, I’m pleased to announce that we have Full virtualisation of courses in Creatonaut, meaning instead of just seeing a static view of your question, You can test, audit and run your course directly within Creatonaut as if it was running on an iPhone within the Lingonaut app. I can’t overstate how much of an improvement this is over our original promise and how helpful it’ll be not just to volunteers wanting to check how their questions and guides look within Lingonaut, but to everyone else who might want to make or do custom or community made courses. It’s not just a preview window anymore, it’s fully functional, error detection, all question types, sound effects & all, with your mouse serving as a substitute for touch.

Edits you make will be available immediately within the simulator (If you’ve used xCode before you’ll feel right at home!) and whilst there are UI differences between the simulator and what will be the final released app on iOS, we hope that the simulator will give you a good idea on how courses will look and run, help you spot mistakes or errors, and serve as a gap-filler whilst we finish work on Lingonaut. Screenshots below:

Whilst full virtualisation of courses is supported, hardware acceleration and internet features are not. Therefore things like UI elements and animations may look considerably more janky (though better than if the simulator was built without GDIu) and are not a final or complete representation on how the app will look and behave once it releases. Secondly your progress on courses done within Creatonaut won’t be saved to the Lingonaut platform or carried over to the lingonaut app. Likewise, there isn’t a way to login to your Lingonaut account or access any of the internet features. Virtualisation is restricted to the course content only.

It was an immensely difficult task to add full virtualisation for our six existing question types, and it’s been great to see Creatonaut turn from just a small companion app to a fully featured IDE but that’s not all we’ve done!

Four new question types! (for a total of ten)

We’ve also added three new question types to both LN and CN! These new question types, PickOneAudio, SpellingPick, PickOneMeaning and PickMissingWord, will complement our existing question types and increase the total question type roster to 10, not including stories. These questions will be available both in the simulator and in the editor in the CN 1.2 release and at launch for Lingonaut too!

The list of question types available now is found below:

  • PickOneAudio
  • SpellingPick
  • ImagePick
  • PickWords
  • PickMissingWord
  • Match
  • AudioMatch
  • PickOneMeaning
  • WriteWords
  • PickOne

Creatonaut 1.2 also comes with a host of other new features, bug fixes and optimisations to make course creation for our Translatonauts even easier!

  • Fixed random font changing in guide editor
  • Replaced unicode bulletpoints with system bulletpoints
  • Added flag preview window
  • Added 30 new images to gallery
  • Fixed last saved item not reflecting guide edits
  • Automatic saving of newly inserted questions
  • Fixed broken fonts in textboxes.
  • Fixed button misalaignments.
  • Added Czech, Welsh and Croatian as selectable languages.
  • Fixed last saved time not reflecting guide edits.
  • Czech course bundled with app as template.
  • And many other smaller fixes and improvements!

Creatonaut will soon have its own page as part of a site overhaul and 1.2.0 will be available starting the 1st of August. Screenshots below:

At this stage we consider Creatonaut to be fully complete and no more feature updates are anticipated, all development effort will now go fully towards getting Lingonaut out for iOS. Bug fixes may occasionally still release but this chapter for Lingonaut development is over for now.

Czech course template now finished!

I’ve been working on a Czech course to serve as template and guide resource for Translatonauts to refer to once they begin to build out their own courses, as a way to judge pacing, what grammar tips should appear when and how concise or verbose those notes should be.

During out last Q&A I said that the first Unit’s notes were largely complete and some of Unit 2 was still being worked on but I’m relieved and glad to finally say that the vocab list, notes and most questions for Unit 1 and the first half of Unit 2 are complete. All that remains is some proof-reading and adding in some questions that utilise the new question types we now have available in CN.

This means that we’re finally going to be able to go full steam ahead with course production by Translatonauts whilst I shift my time to focusing on Lingonaut app development. The course will come bundled with Creatonaut 1.2 and your existing versions of Creatonaut will update automatically and add this to your repo folder.

And speaking of Courses,

Welsh and Croatian courses Greenlit!

Enough Croatian and Welsh volunteers got together to build Translatonaut teams and asked for Welsh and Croatian courses to be added to the launch roster that we’ll now have them available at or soon after launch! They’ve been added to CN and will be part of the overhaul to the Translatonaut program.

New Contributor System!

When we first tried rolling out and signing up all the contributors to their chosen languages, It very quickly became an unorganised mess. Unfortunately (and just like many members said in advance) discord is just a poor way to coordinate lots of teams of lots of people. So we’re changing how we’ll do things.

Switching from Discord to Lingonaut.app

First of all we’ll move all course creation discussion and organisation off from discord and completely onto the website, rather than half and half like it was before. This will make it much easier to allocate roles, upload and download WIP courses using the portal and most importantly keep everything organised.

Opening up discord channels for everyone

The existing channels that were for contributor only discussion (but were commonly mistaken for general language chat) will be renamed and opened for everyone to comment in as general language chats, and course creation discussions will take place under their own subforums at forum.lingonaut.app, as part of the contributor system overhaul.

Assembling the teams

As the Czech course is in a state to be released on the 1st of August, it gives us roughly two weeks to assemble and coordinate the contributors so they can hit the ground running. I’ll be contacting everyone who’s registered for the contributor program individually so I can first confirm that they’re ready and still willing to contribute and then create their Lingonaut account or designate their existing account as a contributor for that language! Once that’s done they’ll be able to access the portal and liaise with the rest of their team.

The full lists of team members for each team will also be published by then!

Finally, lets talk about CEFR.

CEFR And OLPS

We don’t have the budget to requisition and use CEFR labelling on our courses and formally align them, so we’ve created an alternative that’ll be used to indicate what stage doing Lingonaut courses will bring you to called the Open Language Proficiency Score. At this point we’re aiming for 60+ across all courses, which is roughly A2 level on CEFR and indicates that you know all essential grammar and have at least 60+ coverage of non-specialist everyday vocabulary in that language. What ‘everyday vocabulary’ means will evolve over time as we begin to create our courses and have discussions on what that should cover.

We hope that other language learning platforms that are unable to use CEFR labelling can use OLPS as an alternative.

And that’s everything! We hope you’re as excited as we are for the coming developments as we begin the sprint to the finish line.

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