Salam all. I've had this idea for awhile and didn't have the time to sit
down and write anything about it till now. With the recent success of the
'quran' project (the project has attracted a great number of new developers
which rates highly in my book, plus its a wonderful noble project).
A couple of thoughts come to mind,
1. Has anyone given thought to extending the current 'quran' project to
include Hadith or a means to link it in somehow ? Seems like a logical
next step.
2. Start a new project (similar to 'quran') which is more generic in its
purpose and content. In other words, call it a 'generic reader' or a
'multimedia browser'. This agent/application would have a generic
means of displaying whatever is given to it in a particular format
(say like in an XML file or something). It would be able to display
pictures, text, etc. The main purpose of such a thing would be to
bring forth a means to display children's stories and various other
learning/teaching material. Given a particular file format
specification people can port any (and all of their) stories, teaching
documents, etc (could even be the Holy Quran itself) and be displayed.
So now you see why I'm putting all of this under the quran project
context -- there are similarities. Some will say, just use HTML and
a browser and my reply to them would be "we need to make it simple and
easy". In other words, if someone would like to scan a few pictures
he/she drew and would like to add text to it to make a story about
ducks and chickens :-), then we should try to make it really simple
for him/her to do so. Something like showing a 2-pan open page book
(ie. go grab a book and open it in the middle and view if from top,
that's what it should look like) with the right (or left) page showing
the picture and the other page showing the text -- a couple of buttons
for prev/next to show subsequent pages, etc; very simplistic (we can
add voice/video later if need be).
Its been suggested that there are similar "for-money" (ie. closed source)
projects out there that do similar things (I'm not familiar with any of
them myself), but will mention them in case people are interested in
finding out more about them for discussion purposes,
+ Macromedia Director
+ Macromedia Authorware
+ Magenta Composer/Player
+ Opus
In short, its an idea which seems kinda-of an extension to what is already
taking place and as such I would love to hear what people think and have
to say with regards to this. Keep in mind that one of the things we're
trying to do is to increase Linux's circulation in the Arab world and we
most certainly need to do it in the Universities and Schools in general,
so why not generate content that approaches our kids and younger generations.
If we make things simple enough, we can have kids create their own stories
and content :-)
Does anyone know if there are similar ideas/projects in the open source
community that we could look at and learn from or maybe extend and use ?
Ideas/Thoughts/Comments ?
Salam.
- Nadim