CogSketch Revision History
New in v 2.04 (released 1/31/2012)
- Design Coach:
- General:
- Added a new relation arrow type, Design Refinement, for use on the metalayer.
Design refinement arrows can be used between subsketches on the metalayer to
indicate when a subsketch represents a refinement of a design in another subsketch.
- Qualitative Mechanics (physics):
- Fixed a bug where rotation would not get detected when it should.
- Rotational origin annotations are no longer mandatory for physical objects
(includes all rigid objects) to be rotated through torques. If a rotational
origin annotation glyph is not provided, the center of mass of the object will
be used instead.
- Tell Window:
- Expanded the language-like sentences grammar and vocabulary to include sentences
about function.
- When sentences from an old version are detected they cannot be loaded, but text
versions of them will be added to the overall description box in the tell window,
so the user can try to re-enter them in the LLI.
- Added a separate text box for giving feedback about the Design Coach.
- Feedback:
- Added some feedback for new sentences about function.
- Added feedback when sentences are incomplete.
- Introducing the CogSketch Gradebook! It's a convenient tool for organizing and
grading sketches submitted by students for assignments in the various courses handled
by an instructor.
New in v 2.03 (released 10/11/2011)
- Design Coach:
- Replaced all references to "Design Buddy" with "Design Coach".
- Updated Design Coach tutorial.
- Fixed a bug where the Tell window would not work or save data in new design sketches.
- By default, CogSketch disables press-and-hold for right-click on the drawing-pane since
that introduces an annoying delay when starting to draw each ink-stroke. Some users
really like press-and-hold, though, so you can now choose to enable it if desired from
the preferences screen.
- Opening the glyph properties dialog for a relation glyph is now much faster.
- Bug Fix: The glyph thumbnail pane is now correctly updated when pasting items to a sketch.
New in v 2.02 (released 8/5/2011)
- The interface mechanics for ink-drawing have been greatly improved. Essentially,
you can simply start drawing. You still need to click a Finish button when finished
with the ink for an object, but now ink can be edited, breaking up a glyph into
multiple pieces, and merging multiple pieces of ink into new glyphs. An unobtrusive
Glyph Map makes it straightforward to see at a glance how CogSketch is viewing your
ink, so that you can edit it if necessary.
- Can now create history reports – HTML documents with pictures showing the actions
the user performed during the history of a given sketch.
- Actions are now grouped for undo/redo in a more intuitive way. For example, if
you move four items at once, they are now recorded as a single group; you no
longer have to click the undo button four times to undo those four moves.
- We've added a couple new tutorials: one teaching the basics and a more advanced
one describing subsketches and the metalayer.
New in v 2.01 alpha (released internally 6/14/2011)
- Partial implementation of new user-interface.
- Can now replay audio files during experiments.
New in v 1.31 (released 5/6/2011)
- Bug Fix: When a user moves, rotates, or resizes a relation glyph, CogSketch is supposed to
re-infer the arguments for that relation. This would sometimes fail, but now is more robust.
New in v 1.30 (released 5/3/2011)
- New preference -- can force nuSketch to use OpenGL lines when rendering polylines.
This can be faster but doesn't look as nice. See Edit/Prefereces/Graphics/.
- More prompts and dialogs can be customized for experiments.
- Audio files can be played at the start of experiment trials.
- The CogSketch drawing-panes now automatically disable Windows Pen Flicks and press-and-hold
for right-click, thus making inking more responsive. These features are disabled for the
drawing-panes only, so you can keep those enabled for the rest of your apps, if desired.
Unfortuantely due to a Windows bug, when software disables press-and-hold for a particular
window, there is still a small delay when you first put the pen down to draw (or press the
left-mouse button to draw). If you disable press-and-hold in the Windows Pen Options
for all applications, that delay is removed completely.
- Improved logging of errors.
- Files created using File/Export Ink now include clock-time timestamps in addition to
the sketch-time.
- Bug Fix: If you assigned a namestring but not a conceptual label to a glyph in a CogSketch
worksheet, an error would occur when you ran the tutor to get feedback on your sketch. ("About
to bind sme::pred to nil / No match whatsoever found between solution and workspace.") This has
been fixed.
- Bug Fix: When copying and pasting glyphs between sketches, the text label (namestring) wasn't
being displayed properly (it would often be invisible unless the glyph was selected). This has
been fixed.
- Bug Fix: Using undo while drawing an annotation glyph would cause the "Finish" button for the
annotation to become unclickable. This has been fixed.
New in v 1.29 (released 4/14/2011)
- Teachers can now use our automatic grading utility for worksheets that contain grading criteria.
- Whenever the sketch history is exported, a glyph info file is now also created. This file provides
a quick list of the glyphs in the various subsketches along with useful information like the namestrings
and conceptual labels assigned to those glyphs.
- Sketch files can now also hold KB Extensions for facts using global and special predicates.
- Bug Fix: In v1.28, undo while drawing a glyph didn't work properly. It was supposed to undo the last
ink-stroke drawn but instead it would undo the last major action performed.
New in v 1.28 (released 4/8/2011)
- Bug fix: Tooltip windows weren't being closed properly, which could cause CogSketch to get
more and more sluggish the longer you used it.
- Experiments can now suppress the right-click shortcut menus if desired.
- Queries for (positionalRelationFor glyph1 glyph2 ?rel) will now also assert
(?rel glyph1 glyph2) facts as approrpiate.
- Improved tutor suggestions about quantitaive values. We can now catch a few cases we missed before.
- Bug fix: Analogies involving commutative expressions could fail to put matching commutative
expressions into correspondence. This is now fixed and allows quantitaive values associated with
annotation glyphs to match more successfully.
New in v 1.27 (released internally 3/24/2011)
- Bug fix: Under certain conditions, users could drag to move a selected item even if it
was locked via the user-interaction locks.
- Bug fix: On-screen rendering of the quantitative ink comparison tolerance region failed
for glyphs composed of polygons (rather than polylines).
- Support added internally for worksheet-specific reasoning that should be done when tutoring
advice is requested. This is not yet exposed through the Worksheet Property Editor, though.
- Several shape- and edge- level representations can now be queried from within the reasoning system.
Also added new shape-level representations for FullyCurvedShape and FullyStraightShape.
New in v 1.26 (released 3/18/2011)
- Bug Fix: Saving preferences would fail in CogSketch v1.25 if it had been installed on a
machine that had not had an earlier version of CogSketch installed.
New in v 1.25 (released 2/28/2011)
- Worksheets can now show the user follow-up questions.
- Worksheet designers can now create hidden layers that are only revealed to the
student at certain times, like when showing an explanation for a follow-up question.
- You can now import pictures to be used as glyphs. (See "Import Picture as Glyph"
on the "Glyphs" menu.)
- You can now change the ordering of layers within a subsketch. Right click on the
desired layer's button in the layer control pane (on the left side of the sketching
window), and choose "Move Layer Up" or "Move Layer Down".
- Selection of glyphs has changed a bit. When in tap-select mode, tapping an unselected
glyph will add it to the current selection without unselecting whatever else is
selected; tapping a selected glyph will unselect it without also unselecting anything
else. Tapping in a blank area will unselect everything.
- Arrow interpretation has been expanded to work on the kinds of arrows geoscientists
often use that have a one-sided head.
- Sketch playback of experiments will now start from the beginning of an experiment
trial rather than from the beginning of the sketch's creation.
- You can now use the tab key to select glyphs when the drawing-pane is the window
that has focus. The drawing-pane is the white pane in which you draw your sketch.
Click on that and then each time you hit the tab key, the next glyph on the current
layer, in their occlusion order, will be selected. Shift-tab moves backwards
through the glyphs.
- Bug Fix: Experiments and tutorials will no longer try to auto-run during mass export
operations.
- Bug Fix: Copied relation glyphs will now correctly include the knowledge stating that
they are relations. Previously that information was lost and CogSketch would then think
that those glyphs were regular glyphs instead of relations.
New in v 1.24 (released 10/20/2010)
- A tutorial infrastructure has been created and the installer now includes a
Design Buddy tutorial. Expect to see more tutorials in the future.
- RCC8 relations are now computed more correctly.
- Glyph blob-boundary computations have been improved.
- Bug fix: Copied glyphs would bring in old collections assigned to the original
even if they were no longer true.
- Bug fix: Sketch Playback on a meta-layer would cause an error.
New in v 1.23 (released internally 7/29/2010)
- Added "Show Ink-Stroke Ordering" to the Experimenter menu. This is similar to
"Show Glyph Ordering" but shows the ordering of each individual ink-stroke instead
of entire glyphs.
New in v 1.22 (released 7/16/2010)
- Sketch files are now correctly registered with the Windows shell.
Double-clicking one or more sketch files in the Windows File Explorer, for
example, will open the files in CogSketch, launching it if it's not already
started.
- Design Buddy changes:
- Glyphs are no longer automatically renamed "Rename me!" on creation.
- Some glyphs receive additional default collections on creation:
- Relation arrows on the metalayer are automatically labeled "causes".
- Relation arrows on ordinary layers are labeled "connectedTo-directly".
- Ordinary glyphs created on non-metalayers are labeled "RigidOb".
- Various changes to improve the speed and accuracy of Design Buddy feedback generation.
- Simulation changes:
- Perceptual sketchpad and geometric analogy now use Spatial Routines to compare
images and solve problems.
- Spatial Routines provide better inspection tools for viewing results and the
operations that computed them.
New in v 1.21 (released internally 6/16/2010)
- If you delete a glyph being annotated and no other glyphs are being annotated by
the same annotation, the annotation glyph will now also be removed.
- Multi-subsketch experiments are now possible. Currently there is not an authoring
environment for such experiments, but you can work with us to develop them.
- Mass History Export -- You can now have CogSketch export history files for all the
sketches in a given folder.
- When assigning sketch registration using the two-point method, you can now have
different scales for the X and Y axes.
- A deadlock could occur during screen redraws. This has now been fixed.
- Copy/paste bug fix -- Previously, if you copied a glyph without a user-assigned
namestring (i.e. no text labelling the glyph visible on-screen), pasted copied of
that glyph would have visible text with a very generic namestring (e.g. "Object-23").
This no longer occurs. If the copied glyph didn't have a namestring originally, it
won't have one after it's been pasted.
- Copy/paste bug fix -- Knowledge wasn't correctly pasted when a glyph was copied
from a normal layer to the metalayer.
- Fixed some minor window focus and window state retention issues.
- Fixed a problem where drawing glyphs beyond the boundaries of the voronoi
diagrams computed for the sketches would cause an infinite loop.
New in v 1.20 (released 3/31/2010)
- Bug fix for Export Sketch History -- prior to this change, exporting
the history with detailed ink information would fail.
New in v 1.19 (released 3/10/2010)
- Bug fix for the "Draw Glyph" right-click menu item.
- Improved blob boundaries -- we now also keep track of the interiors of the
closed parts of a blob boundary. Among other things, this means we can compute
RCC8 relations at a more fine-grained level (a glyph can only be contained by
another, for example, if it's inside one of the closed regions).
- The shortcut key for deleting items is now the "delete" key. Previously it had
been ctrl-del.
- Bug fix: The worksheet property editor works with old CogSketch worksheets
(e.g. Cell-DNA-Worksheet.sk) again.
- Increased speed of reasoning. There had been some 4000 empty microtheories in the
CogSketch reasoning environment that are now removed. Also improved the speed
at which the reasoner handles merging environments in the knowledge-base
containing many microtheories with the microtheories mentioned in the
working-memory.
New in v 1.18 (released 2/26/2010)
- Improved knowledge representation for quantitative values assigned via annotations,
which helps analogies involving those values.
-
Worksheet designers can now order the facts important for tutoring by importance.
More important facts will show up earlier in the tutor's suggestions.
- The tutor suggestions window now shows only the first three suggestions, rather
than overwhelming the student with all the suggestions at once. A student can still
view all the suggestions if desired, by clicking a "Show more suggestions" button.
- The Design Buddy structured language input window is no longer kept within the
CogSketch parent frame. In addition, the window will now initially spawn in the
correct location every time.
- Considering sentences with the Design Buddy has been made more efficient, especially
for "x is y" sentences.
New in v 1.17 (released 11/8/2009)
- Improved representation and justifications for glyphs that represent relations.
This leads to better analogies, among other things.
- Automatically generated namestrings for relations now give more information. Gives
better feedback to user about what CogSketch thinks the relation represents.
- Improved handling of analogies involving qualitative directions.
- Bug Fix: In exported ink files, timestamps no longer end in "d0".
- Bug Fix: When using Mass Image Export, background images had not been included in
the exported images. This has been fixed.
New in v 1.16:
- When rendering thin lines (currently defined to be less than 2 pixels in width), OpenGL lines will be used. When rendering thicker lines, OpenGL polygons will be used. On computers that support full-screen anti-aliasing, you won't notice much of a difference. But some computers with lower quality graphics processors only support line anti-aliasing, so this change will improve the appearance of thin lines while still giving the advantages of polygons for thicker lines.
- Lines used on the Voronoi and Positional layers will now always be one pixel wide. Rendering speed for these layers has also been improved.
- Ink- and voronoi- processor crashes and restarts are now recorded in the sketch history. This is mainly to help with debugging and these events are not included in the history export files.
- Worksheet designers can now control whether or not the Tutor/Feedback button is available.
- Worksheet designers can now control whether or not users can assign their own namestrings to glyphs.
- Worksheet solutions can now be password-protected.
- Worksheet designers can have the tutor give advice based on quantitative ink comparisons to the solution.
- Worksheet designers can lock glyphs in the workspace, preventing students from moving, rotating, resizing, deleting, changing the conceptual label, or changing the namestring.
- Improved arrow interpretation.
- Inferences from annotations are now justified in an improved way. Also such inferences are now automatically recomputed if they depend upon the ink in the annotation glyph and/or the glyphs annotated. So, for example, if an annotation depends upon the direction of a glyph that looks like an arrow, and that glyph is then rotated, the inference about the arrow's direction will be automatically redone.
- Improved analogies used by the tutoring process.
- Worksheet designers can now control whether or not the tutor warns students about extra glyphs that they may have drawn. This is independently controllable for each acceptable collection, relation, and annotation. So, for example, a teacher may allow students to draw extra rock layers but have the tutor generate warnings if the student draw extra faults.
- Improved tutoring suggestions about missing entities.
- Tutor can generate suggestions about glyphs that have not been labelled (i.e those for which the student has not told CogSketch what they represent).
- CogSketch can send sketches via email. Related to this, users can opt-in to have CogSketch automatically send us their sketches to improve our research data.
New in v 1.15:
- Fixed a bug in the Backup and Restore Knowledge-Base menu options — fileutils.fasl
was not being included in the executable build, so users would get an error message when
they attempted to backup or restore the KB.
- Backup Knowledge-Base remembers which folder you selected so that Restore Knowledge-Base
can use that as a default to make it easier for you to find your backup.
- If Software Developer Mode is enabled in the preferences, the following options will now
appear on the Development menu even when no sketch is active (previously you had to open
a sketch before you could see these options): KQML Server Status, Memory Status, and Threads
- Previously, when CogSketch attempted to show a web page (when showing knowledge about a glyph,
for example), if a browser window was already active, sometimes it would not display the newly
requested page. This now works more reliably.
- Under some conditions, drawing line-segments on the voronoi layer could cause a crash. This
has been fixed.
New in v 1.14:
- Fixed a bug in the edge-handling perception code.
New in v 1.13:
- Improved ink rendering.
- Improved user-interface. Hopefully it is more clear how to draw glyphs, arrows
(relations), and annotations now. Some clutter has been removed from the toolbar
and put in the main menus instead. Added a right-click entry for editing glyph
properties (conceptual labels, namestring, etc.).
- Fixed some inconsistencies in selecting font sizes and line thicknesses.
- Fixed the "Reposition Text Label" menu option. (It would cause CogSketch to freeze
until you had clicked on another window and then clicked back on a CogSketch window.)
- Added two new options for worksheet designers — you can now select the user-interface
skin for the workspace and you can select the initial interaction mode (tap-select,
draw-glyph, etc.).
- undo / redo
- Changed grid location so that there is a grid intersection at {0,0}. Previously, {0,0} was
in the center of a grid square, which seems less intuitive.
- We now prevent users from making interaction-mode changes while drawing glyphs. Previously
the UI allowed users to do this, but CogSketch would get very confused.
- When resizing glyphs by dragging one of the corner hotspots, aspect ratio is now preserved
by default. If you hold down the control key, you can override this. Previously, it was the
other way around — aspect ratio was only preserved if you held down the control key.
- Added right-click menu option for metalayer glyphs that represent subsketches — you can now
edit subsketch properties directly from the metalayer.
- Fixed a major bug in the KQML-based API. It had been an older API developed for sKEA rather
than the newer API described in the docs that install with the executable.
New in v 1.12:
- Bug fixes in the Qualitative Mechanics code. Also now includes all the correct QM rules
(v1.11 had some old and incorrect rules).
- It was possible to get the ink-processor stuck in a disabled mode if you slid the pen/mouse
while double-clicking a glyph. That’s been fixed.
- The glyph properties editor for glyphs that represent relations on the metalayer was not
always showing the correct values for the relation’s arguments. This has been fixed.
- Perceptual Sketchpad example #1 failed to build a comparison between the two entities.
This has been fixed.
- CogSketch now supports KB Patch Scripts, so that we can send out updates to the knowledge-base
without requiring you to re-download the entire knowledge-base.
- You can drag sketches from Windows Explorer to the main-pane of CogSketch (the window with the
dark-gray background).
- Removed some old pre-perceptual-sketchpad menu options that didn't really work all that well:
- Compare Glyphs
- Mark as A
- Mark as B
- Right-click menu now has option for editing the glyph properties.
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