Thinking Out Loud

October 2, 2005

CueCard

Filed under: wxWidgets, Alternatives

CueCard is a freeware flashcard program with source code available. Since it was written using the wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) application framework, which is what I am using, I downloaded the source and executable for a closer look.

Instead of Leitner sorting of cards presented, it has its own way of taking missed answers into account. The design is very clean, it doesn't require looking at any help file at all. It influenced me to take care of the user interface in my flashcard game. So far the source code hasn't influenced me much, but I want to take a look at his Unicode support because that’s important.

The one I am writing wants to be a commercial project, although with a hobbyist time frame unfortunately. I will try to always keep "light" versions as freeware. I am not planning a free release of the complete source code of either version. I don’t expect it to be a blockbuster app, just enough to keep me from chasing nickels on Blogger. (The Google ads on this page are not mine, they help keep the blogsome.com service free.)

Smart quotes

Filed under: Blogsome

This post has been updated (finally). See last paragraph.

Dave said, "This is a test of killing off those sickening ’smart quotes’ which I don’t need." Blogsome and Wordpress apparently default to converting all quotes to so called smart quotes. One problem is Verdana (and potentially other web fonts) doesn’t really have decent smart quotes, they look like a superscript version of \\ and //, which in turn makes it look like the page was generated by a backwater perl script. The only workaround I have found is to use &34; every time I need a double quote and &39; every time I need an apostrophe. I don’t have time for this horse hit. I looked at the Blogsome plugins page but there’s nothing activated that would cause this, also I looked at css but I couldn’t get it to work.

UPDATE Nov 1, 2006: This is no longer an "issue" (entered normally) when using the WYSI-Wordpress plugin, which I am. There is also a WP Unformatted plugin available that addresses the smartquotes issue specifically.






















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