[Etoys] Heap expansion with big truetype fonts

[Luke Gorrie]

Howdy Bert!

> We have a problem with colored TT font rendering. In your test
> project, if you remove the drop shadow in your example, memory
> consumption stays sane. My guess is that with a drop shadow,
> rendering switches between black and blue constantly, thrashing the
> TT glyph cache.

Does this sound readily fixable? If so, any pointers on where to look?
I expect we'll revisit this problem next week (this week is refinement
and new development).

> Btw, your games are beautiful!

Thanks! This is thanks to Om Yadav, our designer/illustrator. He only
had a couple of days to prepare the graphics for this demo but now
he's joined us full time so we're looking forward to lots of snazzy
new activities. We plan to grow both the programming and design groups
as soon as is practical.

Currently I'm working on refining the code from our demo activities so
that a non-programmer designer can rebuild them directly in Squeak.
High hopes :-)

> A quick way of testing it on an XO is putting your image onto a USB
> Flash drive in a folder named "olpc-dev", and rename it to
> "etoys.image". Then clicking the Etoys icon will use that alternate
> image (we put that in for debugging).

Yep - this is how we ran it for the government demo.

> If you can make an SVG activity icon I can help you create a
> proper .xo activity bundle from it (unless you have that already).

That would be great! We'll get back to you with an icon tomorrow.

> And did you think about Journal integration and sharing, yet?

We haven't given this even the first thought yet. Ideas welcome :-)

Cheers!
-Luke