What's New with ToonTalk

What's New with ToonTalk?

ToonTalk is always changing. Bugs are fixed. New features are added. And new ToonTalk programs are made available.

August 6, 2005. Beta 49 released which adds the ability to indicate that help or error messages are available without interrupting.

May 5, 2005. Beta 48 released which adds a few minor features (the ability to interrupt lengthy loads and downloads and an interface for changing any ToonTalk customization option). Also all the documentation has been updated and 'SHOW ME' buttons added to many pages. Microsoft Agent's Peedy has been added to all pages for those who need help reading.

February 15, 2005. Dinner with Seymour Papert and Carol Strohecker where many interesting questions came up.

January 2, 2005. Beta 47 released which is capable of running without installation (though this is only currently used on full CD-ROM releases) and improved drag and drop facilities.

November 15, 2004. Beta 46 released which includes new ways of displaying and speaking numbers.

September 27, 2004. Beta 45 released.

July 19, 2004. Beta 44 released.

June 18, 2004. Beta 43 released.

April 10, 2004. Beta 42 released.

November 24, 2003. Beta 41 released.

August 12, 2003. Beta 40 released.

June 24, 2003. Beta 39 released which has much improved time travel, new ways of saving your creations, and a new way of displaying numbers.

February 3, 2003. Beta 38 released which includes XML support.

October 5, 2002. Beta 37 released.

September 1, 2002. Animated Programs celebrates its tenth birthday. The first line of ToonTalk code was written October 14, 1992. WebLabs research project begins.

August 30, 2002. Beta 36 released. It introduces support for saving and restoring ToonTalk objects in XML. Also supports screen resolutions greater than 1600x1200. Dusty the Vacuum can now be customized to have one use per click.

July 9, 2002. Beta 35g released which fixes a few serious bugs on beta 35.

July 6 and 7, 2002. The ToonTalk children's workshop at the art.bit exhibit at the NTT InterCommunication Center went very well. 15 Japanese children learned how to make games in ToonTalk.

June 24, 2002. Beta 35 released. Changes include the ability to run on a touch sensitive screen or with a stylus, Windows XP compatibility, and all new HTML based dialogs.

June 2002. ToonTalk won the Dr. Toy's Best Vacation Children's Product Award.

June 13, 2002. ToonTalk exhibited as art in Tokyo from June 21 to August 11 at the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, Japan.

June 4, 2002. ToonTalk was used in a ten-week course at Plugged In, an after school program attempting to reduce the digital divide.

March 28, 2002. Beta 34b released. The most important change is a fix of a bug introduced in Beta 34 that broke the sixth puzzle. The component in a robot's thought bubble that fails to match now glows red.

March 7, 2002. Beta 34 released. The most important change in this release is that numbers are now as long as they need be and exact rational numbers are used when necessary.

March 6, 2002. WebLabs research project will build upon ToonTalk to enable children to build science and math projects.

December 12, 2001. Beta 33 released. Among other things this release supports all the standard color depths (8-bit, 15-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit).

December 1, 2001. ToonTalk released in Japan.

November 15, 2001. A new ToonTalk publicity campaign is launched by K. Junger & Associates in the US and Canada. Also ToonTalk prices in North America (and parts of South America and Asia) are reduced by 50%.

October 25, 2001. ToonTalk won the Fall 2001 Parents' Choice Gold Award. The Japanese version of ToonTalk will be available from MICRONET in December.

August 17, 2001. Beta 32 released. Bammer can run backwards and touch sensitive mice are now supported.

August 14, 2001. The chapter on ToonTalk in the book The Design of Children's Technology, "Helping Children to Learn Hard Things: Computer Programming with Familiar Objects and Actions" is now available on-line.

June 28, 2001. Beta 31 released. Some small enhancements and bugs fixed.

May 31, 2001. A paper on the relationship of ToonTalk and Logo will appear in the proceedings of EuroLogo 2001 and Logo Update. The paper is now available here.

April 13, 2001. US ToonTalk version 2 is now available. Current owners of US CD-ROMs can download patch 2.39 or order the new US version 2.36 CD-ROM for just the cost of shipping and handling. Updates to non-US versions are in progress. There is also a new trial and beta version.

March 21, 2001. Beta 28 released. Unless some bugs are reported very soon this is the same executable as the next product release (2.36).

March 7, 2001. Beta 27 released. Some bugs in Beta 26 fixed.

Feb 16, 2001. Beta 26 released. This version includes additional enhancements to the Java applet generator. Lots of bugs were also fixed.

December 24, 2000. Beta 25 released. This version includes a major update of the ToonTalk generator of Java applets. Every game in the Playground Game Place can now be automatically turned into a Java applet that can run in any modern web browser without plug-ins. Also the remote control for the appearance of a picture was completely re-implemented with additional functionality. And lots of bugs were fixed.

December 2000. An article on ToonTalk and Ken Kahn was published in the Japanese journal named BIT.

October 18, 2000. Beta 24 released. This version supports Windows Input Editor (IME) for entering text such as Japanese. While there has been major progress on upgrading the Java applet generator work still remains for the next release. This version handles very tiny objects (smaller than a pixel) much better. Saving, loading, and running very large cities has been sped up significantly. And of course lots of bugs have been fixed.

September 25, 2000. Ken Kahn interviewed regarding educational technology and how ToonTalk fits in to the big picture.

September 18, 2000. ToonTalk launched in Brazil. This version has all the text, documentation, and speaking in Brazilian Portuguese. Visit www.toontalk.com.br for more details. This is a different version from the one that launched in Portugal recently. Visit www.toontalk.com/pt/toontalk.htm or www.cnotinfor.pt for more details of the European Portuguese version.

September 2000. An article on ToonTalk appeared in the Japanese magazine Byte.

June 9, 2000. Beta 23 released. This supports birds that can fly to nests on other computers. It also supports user pictures that are JPG, GIF, or PNG. June 16, 2000 Beta 23c released which fixes bugs that interfered with some puzzles in 'Play Game'.

March 30, 2000. Beta 22 released. This fixes several bugs and supports a TT file extension in Windows or a web browser.

March 18, 2000. ToonTalk featured in the Portuguese television show The Magazine (channel RTP2).

March 2000. ToonTalk featured in the March issue of The Communications of the ACM in an article called "Generalizing by Removing Detail".

February 18, 2000. Beta 21 released. This release adds a few new minor features, fixes many bugs, and adds time travel.

December 13, 1999. Beta 20 released.

October 1, 1999. Beta 19 released.

September 13, 1999. Beta 18 released. Documented how you can get ToonTalk to use one of the free text-to-speech voices available from Microsoft.

August 10, 1999. The paper "From Prolog and Zelda to ToonTalk" published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Logic Programming 1999.

July 26, 1999. Beta 17 released.

July 2, 1999. Beta 16 released.

June 30, 1999. Translation of most of the puzzle game to French is freely available.

April 23, 1999. ToonTalk on New Media News television show.

March 30, 1999. Uploaded the paper "A Computer Game to Teach Programming" which will be presented in June at the National Educational Computing Conference.

March 16-18, 1999. Ken Kahn led 3 Roundtable discussions at the Game Developer Conference on an essay by Seymour Papert entitled, "Does Easy Do It? Children, Games and Learning".

March 9, 1999. Divertire, a subsidiary of FuturArte Editora, a distributor and publisher of educational and reference
software in Brazil has agreed to translate ToonTalk to Portuguese and sell it in Brazil.

January 11, 1999. Official release of ToonTalk in North and South America and parts of Asia.

December 30, 1998. The German translation of this web site was completely enhanced and updated. (Thanks to Wolfgang Mueller.)

December 13, 1998. A guide explaining what is learned when solving the puzzles in 'Play Game' has been added.

November 23, 1998. In response to many questions about how ToonTalk is concurrent and why it is difficult to extend conventional languages to be concurrent, a short essay on concurrency was added to this site.

November 16 to December 2, 1998. A discussion was held on comp.lang.logo comparing and contrasting ToonTalk and Logo.

October 27, 1998. First US trial version of ToonTalk released (version 1.04).

October 16, 1998. A patch to bring ToonTalk Beta 14 or Beta 14A to Beta 14B is available.

October 16, 1998. Beta release 14B is now available. Click here to see the list of bug fixes.