JES 5.02 Now Released, and Media Computation 4th Edition Slides Available

JES 5.02 is now released at https://github.com/gatech-csl/jes/releases/tag/5.020.  I have links to all the main downloads at http://mediacomputation.org .

This is a maintenance release.  Thanks to Nina Koch’s student, Henry, we have fixes for colorizing and some other problems.  Henry has also written code to allow for capture of keystrokes and mouse movement in a picture window, so that you could build some simple games.  I’ll save that for JES 5.10.

I don’t do JES releases that often, so in-between, I forget how painful cross-platform development is. JES is all written in Java and Jython, which means we “write once, test everywhere.”  I developed mostly on Mac OS X, but makensis (for Windows Installers) doesn’t work on Mac OS X.  So I ran Ubuntu in VirtualBox to build the Windows installer and test the Linux version.  But I still had to test on Windows (e.g., to make sure that the Sound Explorer was fixed).  It’s all details —  ls here vs. dir/w there, can’t install Oracle Java from Ubuntu installer, remembering sudo apt-get, Lenovo toolkit updater interrupting installations…

From Github:

 Fixes in JES 5.02 (with many thanks to HenryStevens and sportsracer48 for fixes):

• Fixes a problem if you quit during raw_input that you can’t do another raw_input
• Makes the Sound explorer fully functional again
• Fixes colorizing
• Makes autosave work again
• Fixes a threading error if you hit return too rapidly in the Command Area
• Unicode characters in input file get flagged. (Jython can’t execute a line with unicode characters on it.)

In addition,

You can find all the fourth edition Powerpoint slides (including a 68Mb zip of all of them) at http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-teach/60. I’ve put some of the Peer Instruction question slides into the chapter PPT slide decks, but you can find more at the instructors-only website (see the Media Computation website for more on the teacher website).

Most of the changes are in the early chapters. Chapter 3 on text and language manipulation is all new. The latter chapter PPT slide decks have a few new slides in each deck, including:

• Creating state-preserving versions of picture manipulation functions in Chapter 16 on Functional Programming
• Subclassing Picture and Sound to move functions into methods in Chapter 17 on Object-oriented Programming
• Recursive turtle patterns, which are possible with an improved Turtle class in JES 5 in Chapter 17