May Update – What’s new!

Hey everyone, I thought I’d make a post on what’s being gone at Lingonaut HQ recently, the progress we’ve made and other relevant tidbits!

Creatonaut

At the forefront of development right now is Creatonaut: our course creation, editing and auditing software. When I released the first iteration a few months ago, in an attempt to rush it out so people can get started, it quickly became obvious that it just wasn’t fit for purpose.

Our Translatonauts provide their expertise in languages as well as their time and effort to help make Lingonaut a reality. It’s their belief in building a platform that’s truly free and accessible for everyone equally that’s making this possible. That’s why from the get-go I wanted to make the actual process of making courses as easy as I can.

I didn’t want Translatonauts wasting time trying to get the syntax right or getting the software to work or having to deal with any range of technical issues as that would be valuable time that they set aside for Lingonaut being wasted, not to mention extra frustration that just shouldn’t be a part of the process.

That’s why i went back to the drawing board and began a complete overhaul of the Creatonaut IDE, trying to make it as easy and pleasant to use as possible instead of trying to push something out that was ‘technically’ functional but a nightmare to use.

And on that front, I’d like to show you what we’ve done so far.

UI Overhaul

Like i said earlier, the old version of Creatonaut didn’t just look ugly, it just didn’t work very well. I’ve done a complete overhaul of the underlying frameworks to make Creatonaut look and run like a dream, and putting in the work now to make it much easier to extend it and add more features going forward. This is all possible to what we’ve made and call GDI-Ultra (not to be confused with Gemini Ultra!) which is a huge new UI element and control kit we have built which extends Window’s Native GDI+ with raster-simulated acceleration which will let Creatonaut (and other apps built with GDIu on top of Win32 like a Lingonaut desktop app) look and feel like a hardware accelerated WPF and UWP apps, along with the reduction in flickering to to boot, while still being able to run on virtually any hardware, x86 and ARM included.

It will also allow rapid iteration on new features as they are requested, my perspective is that if I do the difficult ground-laying now, development will be able to go and adapt much faster going forward, rather than having to refactor every few months when a new feature is required.

Optimisations across the board

Along with GDIu, Creatonaut has gone under major refactoring with dozens of optimisations to make using it faster, smoother, and less bug-ridden. Along with this comes new accessibility options. With GDIu, we’ve been able to add support for smaller Non-HD displays.

There’s a new settings menu with more accessibility options, a dark mode, support for audio cues and an on-screen keyboard for quick access to accented characters which you may need for course creation but cannot access from your keyboard.

Automatic updates, automatic backups and automatic saving.

One thing which Translatonauts have found annoying is having to download new binaries and shift their projects over every time a new version is released, with Creatonaut 1.0.0 we’ve added an automatic updater which runs during the splash screen to check if a new version of Creatonaut is available, and will update your existing installation accordingly.

You can now set Creatonaut to automatically back up your entire project every so often (a-la time machine) so if anything goes horribly wrong you can always revert back to a previous revision and go from there.

We’ve also added automatic saving so in case you forget to press the save button manually, your project will be saved every so often (with the delay in between saves being adjustable in your settings)

History (The headlining feature!)

With multiple people working on a single course, it can become difficult to work out who has done what, and this becomes especially frustrating when you’re trying to go over months of changes or trying to pinpoint who made a specific change, or trying to find mistakes or just want to know who did what for a plethora of other reasons.

With the new history view, any changes you make are automatically recorded in the log under current user’s name (which is chosen by the Translatonaut upon first start of Creatonaut), and the last 250 changes can be viewed at any time using the history tab. An option to search by change, element, date or author is currently being worked on as well as an option to view ALL changes (though this can take some time to load in!) Another view that’s still being worked on is the recent changes view, where the last few changes on what you’re currently working on (e.g. a skill or question) is shown as you’re working on it.

Whilst we work on lexeme-tagging, which seems to be by far the most complex feature that’s being requested right now, we hope that the History view, in addition to being a powerful feature on its own, is also a useful stopgap to track changes for now.

More Images!

We’ve added over a hundred new images to the Image gallery so you can use even more images on your course questions to help make them more immersive and understandable for Lingonauts. This is all thanks to our patrons whos pledges mean we can afford the licensing for our images along with other infrastructure!

We’re also working on a way to quickly sort images by searching and filters so you find just what you’re looking for even easier, inspired by Apple’s SFSymbols software.

Text-to-Speech

We’ve added text-to-speech for volunteers who for one reason or another can’t voice their listening exercises. This currently uses on-device text-to-speech which doesn’t sound very good, but we can’t afford Eleven-labs integration right now. Either way, machine-speech just isn’t as good as a human speaker. It can’t get nuance and intonation right and can only serve as a substitute until someone else can record voice.

Currently it’s quite laborious to import your own voice, and we’re working on a way to be able to record your speech within Creatonaut so you don’t have to use a third party tool. For now we recommend Audacity or if you’re on Mac, Voice Memos. If you’re on Windows, Voice Recorder is also an option.

Where’s the preview window?

Ever since Creatonaut has launched we’ve had a placeholder preview window where an app simulator running Lingonaut would allow volunteers to see how their course would look on an actual device running the app. This has always been in the pipeline, and it still is, but it’s very difficult to build this feature into Creatonaut at the moment. This is because we’d essentially be trying run a version of an app that itself isn’t finished yet, not to mention it’s an incredibly massive task on-par with all the rest of Creatonaut the Lingonaut.app (the website) combined! That’s why at the moment I’ve disabled the view in Creatonaut and will come back to it when full-fat Lingonaut is out, both so I can focus on working on the app (which is much more pressing) and to make working on the simulator easier as I now have the app for reference! I hope you understand.

Epilogue (of sorts)

It’s not finished, and there are so many functional and quality of life improvements in the pipeline before it’s ‘1.0.0 ready’ but with any luck, it won’t be too long now, and hopefully I’ll have some more actionable information in the next week. I will go into more detail like I did above as new features are implemented. The full list of changes and bugfixes along with what I’ve talked about above is below!

• Complete overhaul of UI for ease of use done
• Implemented Raster-simulated hardware acceleration for smoother state changes done
• Dozens of optimisations in code behind for increased performance
• Added support for smaller displays
• Added over 100 new icons to the image library
• Added history feed to track who makes what additions and changes
• Removed user-facing solution information to streamline use
• Added automatic update checking and laid groundwork for automatic updates
• Lots of bugfixes!
• Removed preview placeholder
• Added TTS as a back-up for voice notes.
• Added automatic backups of courses.
• Can now open new projects without restarting the app
• Added dark mode
• Added expanded settings menu
• Added help docs
• Added multiple keyboard shortcuts for ease of use
• Added accessibility options for ease of use
• Improved compression of assets to reduce size done
• Added sound cues
• Added autosave
• Added right-click option
• Added tooltips
• Fixed flickering done
• Added header preview
• Added on-screen quick accents for UK/EU/US keyboards
• Added licensing information for purchased assets
• Added accessibility options
• Added search feature to icon gallery
• Added filtering by topics to icon gallery
• Added search feature to history log
• Automatic context panel updates when going through project files

Meet the Crew

We’ve been meaning to get a page similar to Duolingo’s ‘branding’ page for a while, and now we do. It’s not a branding page, as we’re not trying to build a ‘brand’, just trying to make a great learning platform where people feel at home, and having a colourful cast of characters helps towards that!

We’ve called our cast: The crew of the LSS Nautilus ! Much like how space-flights have always had a crew, similar to naval ships. Their ship is named the Nautilus, both from ‘Naut’ as the suffix meaning ‘explorer’, just like Lingonaut, and ‘Nautilus belauensis‘ from the ancient marine animal.

The new meet the crew page also includes art-style information and insight into each crew member’s personalities, both of which are subject to change depending on community input. It’s also useful information for Translatonauts who want to incorporate some ‘lore’ into their courses or for patrons who want to submit their own OC to join the crew!

Censorship and Thoughts on ‘Super Duolingo’ changes

By now everyone is aware that Duolingo Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL) is testing removing the Unlimited hearts perk from Super membership holders, and are moving it up to become exclusive to ‘MAX’ members. Our view on this is likely the same as yours, it’s an incredibly greedy change likely made by the suits up top who care more about profit than building a great language learning platform. This is another feature in a long line that have been removed in the pursuit of ever larger profits and a soaring stock price. Their long-held motto of making language learning accessible to everyone is unfortunately now a thing of the past.

It’s more important than ever for a useful and credible language learning platform like Lingonaut (NASDAQ: NEVER) to serve as actual competition to Duolingo. It encourages innovation, keeps them on their toes and can make them think twice about making anti-consumer moves in the future. Education should be free, not pay-to-win, and that will always be our mission.

We will never charge for hearts, and all features will be available to everyone, equally no matter how much they do or do not donate. I’d like to thank our patrons to make this mission possible as without them none of this would be possible.

Community Manager applications

As we reach 1400 members on our discord and 100 members on the forums, we need more moderation than just our current community management team of two people.

If you have experience in moderation, and have joined the Discord more than two months ago, and have a reddit account older than three years, please get in touch below to submit a moderator application and I’ll reach out to you.

Lingonaut is as much a community platform as a language platform and it’s important that we have a safe, inclusive space where everyone is comfortable and able to learn in peace. Thank you for volunteering!

launchpad updates

We’re making some changes to the launchpad platform, so instead of every language being crammed together on one page, every language will have its own page with project downloads and useful links. We’re also going to integrate launchpad right into Creatonaut (WIP) to make it easier to collaborate with your fellow Translatonauts. There’s been some suggestions that discord-channel method of collaborating and coordinating course development isn’t ideal, and I agree. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve things please let us know in the suggestions channel on the discord!

We’ll also be giving Creatonaut its own page to make things easier to find and in order to facilitate more features being added going forward rather than cramming them all into one page!

The new launchpad will go live simultaneously with Creatonaut 1.0.0

Page updates

There’s been some updates to wording due to legal requirements in the UK and EEA, fixing of typos and updates to the header and footer, in addition to the changes above. If you encounter any issues with the new updates please let me know! We also have our FAQ from the discord mirrored in the wiki.

Streak importing (WIP)

Until now, streak importing was promised for patrons of a certain tier and above as it had to be done manually, including verification. I’ve been working on a way to automate this process and have managed to create a very crude (at this time) implementation for people to import their streak from other platforms during sign-up. Making this automatic will help us go further in the everyone-gets-everything-equally direction we’ve been working towards, as we would be able to roll this out to everyone, patron or not.

More information on this in the coming weeks/months, it’s not a priority right now, just something I stumbled upon in my down-time when I was probing the feasibility of this.

Lingonaut Wiki

A new feature coming to the Lingonaut website is the Lingonaut wiki! It’s going to be a hub where questions and guides will be posted about language learning, Lingonaut, and Creatonaut to serve as a hub of information for both our Lingonauts and Translatonauts! For now, it’ll just be a source of technical documents for Creatonaut but once the main app is released and we have more people on-hand to write up documentation, we hope the Lingonaut Wiki will be a useful hub for all language-related things.

The Lingonaut wiki is successfully active on the website now and will become accessible to users simultaneously with Creatonaut 1.0.0

Lingonaut Forums

It’s wonderful to see so many people join the lingonaut forums, as a space for language discussion and a place immune from the whims of reddit and discord upper management. We’ve rolled out some stability improvements and further optimised the mobile view as there were some bug reports where it wasn’t rendering correctly on mobile. Please let us know if the issue persists on Discord!

Parting words

That’s the wrap up from the last little while! I’ll aim for posting blog posts like these every three weeks or so, unless a big development needs immediate commenting on (like a new feature or software release). Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your day!