CogSketch Revision History

New in v 4.18 (released 1/11/2024)

• Updated knowledge base.

New in v 4.17 (released internally 10/30/2023)

• Can now compute Medial Axis Transforms and Shock Graphs from the UI (when Experimenter or Developer mode is enabled).
• Worksheet authors can now choose to put a limit on the number of times a student can request tutor feedback.
• Bug fix: CogSketch is now tolerant of opening worksheets whose student workspace was deleted.
• Bug fix: UI elements that should have worked with a single click had been requiring two clicks in certain circumstances. This is now fixed.

New in v 4.16 (released 12/21/2020)

• Bug fix: Exporting history action new-subsketch now works again.

New in v 4.15 (released 10/20/2020)

• Worksheet authors can now choose to suppress highlighting associated with a particular piece of tutor advice.

New in v 4.14 (released 9/29/2020)

• You can now use zero for the font-size applied to text labels. Such labels won't be rendered on screen, and will no longer cause errors when being moved, resized, or rotated.

New in v 4.13 (released 9/11/2020)

• Quantitative ink tolerance is now shown correctly for line-segments.
• Custom collection names are now shown correctly for glyphs with a user-interaction lock that prevents users from changing the conceptual label.
• You can now apply user-interaction locks to glyphs that contain only a single line-segment.

New in v 4.12 (released 8/25/2020)

• Tutor correctly handles min/max advice for PercentIndicator annotations.
• Improved manner in which the tutor retracts old advice before generating new advice.
• Worksheet authors can now apply a user-interaction lock on workspace glyphs to prevent students using them as targets for relations and annotations.

New in v 4.11 (released 8/17/2020)

• Added CalorieIndicator and PercentageIndicator annotations.
• Improved highlighting when a tutor suggestion is about a relation. It no longer shows the student which glyphs are the correct ones to involve in the relation.
• Fixed a bug in keyboard shortcuts for copy, paste, select-all, undo, and redo. The drawing-pane had been handling those even if some other window had focus.
• Bug fix: Copy/pasting a layer into the student workspace of a worksheet now correctly causes updates in the Worksheet Property Editor's user-interaction locks.

New in v 4.10 (released 7/9/2020)

• You can now copy and paste fixed-image layers. The image will be pasted using the same position and size as the original.

New in v 4.09 (released 5/14/2020)

• Fixed a bug in the Worksheet Properties Editor. The dialog listing the allowed collections would cause an error if Free Text Entry was chosen.

New in v 4.08 (released 7/31/2019)

• Bug fix: Some posional relation facts had been asserted incorrectly for geospatial layers viewed from the top down.
• Improved robustness when viewing degenerate facts and handling such facts that had been saved in sketch files.

New in v 4.07 (released 12/19/2018)

• Minor improvements to tutor advice.
• Updated sketch file format allows saving of medial-axis transforms.

New in v 4.06 (released 2/6/2018)

• Dragging handles for annotations and relations is no longer slow when used with high resolution pen devices.
• Bug fix: Editing tutoring advice for position-dependent quantitative ink criteria works again.

New in v 4.05 (released 1/23/2018)

• Generating spatial relations in worksheets via the "Get More Facts" button now computes a more human-like notion of between-ness.
• Bug fix: Adding fixed-image layers works again.
• Bug fix: Closed a loophole that would allow worksheet designers and students to create subsketches of the wrong kind.
• Bug fix: Items listed in the User Interaction Locks section of the worksheet properties editor will now update correctly when fixed-image layers are added to the worksheet.
• Bug fix: Grading worksheets through the Gradebook could fail if an old enough worksheet was used as the solution sketch. This is now fixed.

New in v 4.04 (released 11/17/2017)

• CogSketch now works with the recent Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Touch pan and pinch-to-zoom works again, and pens once again draw ink rather than panning the window.
• When using one of the drawing tools, you can now use a pen's barrel button or a mouse right button to draw a glyph selection lasso.
• The Surface pen eraser can now be used to erase ink when using CogSketch's drawing tools.
• Double-tap with touch, reverts the drawing pane's zoom to 1:1 and centers the view on the current subsketch.

New in v 4.03 (released 10/10/2017)

• The CogSketch installer will now also install the correct version of the Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable library if needed (v14.0). Starting CogSketch on older comptuers that lacked this would cause the following error "The program can't start because VCRUNTIME140.dll is missing from your computer".

New in v 4.02 (released 10/5/2017)

• Fixed a bug that could cause the CogSketch tutor to fail to give advice when using collections defined for a worksheet using the "Define new collection" button in the worksheet authoring environment.

New in v 4.01 (released 9/28/2017)

• Worksheet authors can now assign grading points to multiple-choice follow-up questions.
• Improved visualization for quantitative ink boundaries of straight lines assigned when authoring a worksheet.
• Loosened tolerance for the angle of quantitative ink boundaries of straight lines
• Fixed bug in the Gradebook -- importing some worksheets would fail even though they were valid worksheet files.
• Fixed bug in CogSketch Expert Tutorial. Under some circumstances, the tutorial would not allow users to select the Permafrost (frozen) subsketch needed to progress past step #6.

New in v 4.00 (released 2/24/2017)

• We've completely revamped the architecture. Among other things, this will allow us to have CogSketch variants that mostly run on servers, allowing students to use connect via the internet with any device that supports an HTML5 web browser. Note that this release is the Windows OS version. We're still working on the cloud variants, and the new architecture makes that possible.
• Worksheet authors can now describe common misconceptions, allowing the tutor to give more targeted advice if the student's sketch matches on of those misconceptions.

New in v 3.10 (released 6/30/2016)

• Bug Fix: You can once again ask for tutor feedback more than once for worksheets whose analogies involve remapping via quantitative constraints.
• Bug Fix: Worksheets involving edge cycles work again.

New in v 3.09 (released 3/14/2016)

• A backup copy of the Gradebook's database is now created whenever you close it. This allows for the database to be automatically upgraded to new versions and allows CogSketch to fix the database if it ever becomes corrupt.
• You can now right click on an assignment in the Gradebook and upload all the assignment's sketches to the Sketch Repository rather than having to select them individually.
• More information is now included with worksheets uploaded to the Sketch Repository. It's still fully anonymized, but this will help us figure out which worksheets belong together as part of the same assignment and will identify which sketch was used as the solution sketch for the assignment.

New in v 3.08 (released 2/11/2016)

• You can now import SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files.
• The "Overall" rubric in the worksheet tutor feedback used to contain all the tutor advice. This has now been replaced with the "Other Suggestions" rubric which only contains suggestions not already part of any other rubric.
• Expanded the kinds of facts you can have computed by the "Get More Facts" button when authoring worksheets.
• You can now change the wording of the advice generated for student glyphs missing in worksheets.
• You can now disable the Required Glyphs advice for worksheets.
• Improved calculation of partition constraints for analogies performed while generating tutor advice.
• Improved analogy case construction for tutor advice.
• Generation of positional relations for sketches now makes better use of the genre and pose assigned to the various layers.
• Bug fix for generating tutor advice involving symmetric relations.
• Improved handling of Collections and Relations defined by worksheet authors.

New in v 3.07 (released 10/12/2015)

• Improved perimeter-guided edge mapping of interior detail.

New in v 3.06 (released 10/6/2015)

• We now include a sample experiment sketch, useful for gathering sketching data in the laboratory. The sketch can be customized a bit and this is discussed in the user manual, section 9, "Data Gathering for Laboratory Experiments".
• The tutoring advice for worksheets involving shape and edge relations has been improved. We now first compare the perimeters of the objects drawn by the student to those of the solution and use that mapping to help constrain the mapping of interior details.
• We can now generate targeted advice about missing interior detail, so some of the tutor's advice that had been annoyingly vague in the past is now much more useful.
• Lots of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

New in v 3.05 (released 5/4/2015)

• Added support for the following touch gestures in the drawing window:
  • Pan the window with your finger.
  • Zoom in/out with two fingers. Pinch zooms out; spreading your fingers zooms in.
  • Two-finger tap fits the sketch to the window.
• You can now limit straight line drawing to 45° intervals by holding down the Ctrl key.
• CogSketch now has a circle drawing tool that worksheet designers can choose to enable.
• This is the first public release that includes ink partitioning regions -- any ink drawn in such a region is automatically added to that region's glyph. So this is a way of performing automatic glyph segmentation. This is useful where the ink belonging to a given glyph is entirely determined by the region in which it is drawn. For example, in engineering graphics worksheets, all ink drawn in the are for the right orthographic view should belong to the right view glyph. In such cases, worksheet designers can now define ink partitioning regions, so that their students don't need to use the "Finish Glyph" button to tell CogSketch what ink belongs to what glyph and the students don't need to merge ink added later into the various glyphs.
• Ink partitioning regions are also used to reduce the time spent generating tutor suggestions. If nothing has changed in a given region since the last time tutor feedback was requested, the tutor doesn't need to spend time recomputing the suggestions for that region.
• Bug Fix: Copying glyphs associated with Important For Tutoring advice in worksheets would cause the associated advice to be copied as well which would later cause problems (advice not being applicable, impossible to delete the advice, etc.). Also, CogSketch will now remove the bad facts caused by this bug when opening an older sketch.
• Bug fix: Copying relation glyphs and the glyphs they relate (i.e. the relation's arguments) with a single copy/paste operation would cause CogSketch to re-interpret what glyphs are related even if the user already said what they should be. Now if all were copied together and the user already declared them to be arguments for the relation, CogSketch just keeps what the user said and does not try to re-infer the relation's arguments.
• Bug fix: The "Next" button in experiments was getting hidden by the sidebar.
• Bug fix: Drag handles for relation glyphs behave more consistently.

New in v 3.01 (released 3/14/2014)

• This version introduces several major user-interface changes. There is a new sidebar that makes viewing and editing properties easier. The toolbar and layer pane have been revamped. Numerous improvements have been made throughout that make CogSketch easier to use.
• Worksheet authors can now enable a tool for drawing straight lines. This tool is also always available for Design Coach sketches, and can be enabled for all sketches in the user preferences, if desired.
• History reports now generate pictures for each tutor suggestion given, with the appropriate highlighting, so it's easier to see what the suggestions were about.
• Experimenters can now anonymize sketches from the Gradebook, keeping consistent tokens for subjects across multiple experiments or assignments.
• Bug fix: Grading a worksheets through the Gradebook no longer attempts to send all the sketches to us through the Phone Home mechanism.

New in v 2.26 (released 10/22/2013)

• Anonymization bindings are now stored per OS user, thus resolving some file permissions problems.
• Improved printing of sketches (File menu / Print).
• Fixed file associations created by the 64-bit installer.

New in v 2.25 (released 9/18/2013)

• Undo changed for the "finish glyph" operation. Previously, undoing that operation would also cause you to lose the ink that made up the glyph. Now, undoing it returns the ink in the glyph as free ink on the sketch, as it was right before clicking the "Finish Glyph" button.
• Several internal changes to our worksheet tutoring suggestions related to DTC graphics worksheets.
• Many minor bug fixes.
• Design Coach:
  • Labeling glyphs has been simplified: simply select or deselect labels in the list of collections!
  • The feedback button for Design Coach sketches has been moved to make it consistent with Sketch Worksheets.
  • Additional explanations have been added to the feedback for teleological sentences.
  • Updated tutorials to reflect changes.
  • The default line thickness has been decreased from 5 to 2, to better match a pen and paper experience.

New in v 2.24 (released internally 8/31/2013)

• You can now move glyphs to other layers by dragging selected glyphs over the layer buttons.
• Changes to worksheets:
  • Introduced a "Get more facts..." button in the authoring environment for querying for ECO/edge-cycle/edge representations and for positional relations.
  • Added dynamic worksheet elaboration (aka query for questions). When a fact is marked as important for tutoring, post comparison worksheet elaboration queries are put into the sketch's KB extensions microtheory so that the facts that correspond to the important fact will be present in the student's subsketch microtheory.
  • Added two glyph-level predicates that can be used for tutoring: glyphIsBentLine, glyphIsStraightLine.
  • When marking a glyph for quantitative ink advice, if the glyph consists of a single straight line, a worksheet designer can say that the length of the line doesn't matter, just its position and orientation. This is useful, for example, for construction lines on an engineering drawing. It doesn't usually matter how long the guide lines are, it just matters that they are in the right location and have the right angle.

New in v 2.23 (released internally 5/10/2013)

• Design Coach sketches - The drawing pane will now set zoom to fit to window the first time the Design Coach feedback pane opens.

New in v 2.22 (released 4/23/2013)

• You can now erase ink strokes with the new eraser tool!

New in v 2.21 (released 4/3/2013)

• You can now edit lattice properties.
• Support for relative inclination suggestions. This means that you can give advice about the angles of arrows in a specified range.
• Added a "Design Coach Data Export" option to the Experimenter menu. This takes a folder of design sketches and exports their data into a csv file, including the tell window overall description and sentences, sketch notes, the feedback design coach gives on that sketch and more.
• CogSketch is now available in both 32- and 64-bit versions.

New in v 2.20 (released 3/19/2013)

• CogSketch now uses single-click zoom in -- clicking the zoom in button zooms by a fixed amount, keeping the current view centered. Previously, you dragged a box to determine which region to zoom. You can still use the old zoom style if you wish -- simply uncheck "Enable single-click zoom in" in the Preferences.
• The various cursors have been improved so they work on high resolution screens, like that of the Microsoft Surface Pro.
• Generating tutor feedback with shape and edge representations of glyphs now uses a hierarchical approach, working its way from glyphs, to shapes within the glyphs, to the edges within the shapes. This allows the tutor to be more targetted in the advice generated and improves the quality of the analogies made to the teacher's solution.
• When designing new worksheets, you can now define your own collections and relations.
• When adding lattices to a sketch, you can now disable cells within the lattice if desired.
• Fixed a bug in Design Coach sentence construction in the Tell window involving force arrows. Currently there are no verbs which take force arrow annotations as subjects or objects.

New in v 2.18 (released 12/4/2012)

• Added more options for the grid that can be drawn on a sketch:
  • You can choose to show only the intersections of the grid lines.
  • You can choose to have half grid-spacing lines shown as fainter dashed lines.
• Added more options for sketch lattices (line thickness and color).
• Much work has been done on the infrastructure needed to generate tutoring advice involving edges determined by decomposition.
• When viewing worksheet tutor suggestions, pertinent edges determined by edge decomposition can now be shown to the student.

New in v 2.17 (released 11/5/2012)

• Users can now choose where to install the knowledge base if they wish.
• Bug fix: Phone Home works again on sketches with saved edge decompositions.
• Bug fix: Creating history reports now works on worksheets without solutions.
• Improved error reporting when creating history reports.

New in v 2.16 (released internally 10/21/2012)

• Bug fix: users can no longer draw on read-only layers.

New in v 2.15 (released 10/14/2012)

• Improved speed of edge decomposition.
• Improved speed of tutor suggestion generation.
• Improved surface contact detection for Design Coach sketches. It can now handle point contacts better and we can now compute surface contacts along the interior of an object's perimeter.

New in v 2.14 (released internally 10/4/2012)

• The analogy display window is back and better than before. You can start it by choosing "Analogy" when viewing knowledge.
• Design Coach:
  • Further improved surface contact detection.
  • Improved State Transition Verification algorithm for generating feedback.
  • Added new feedback items:
    • for when there are no fixed objects in a causally linked subsketch pair.
    • for incomplete relations.
    • for when a force is (incorrectly) applied directly to a spring.
  • Made various feedback messages more helpful and/or descriptive.
  • Increased robustness of teleological sentence interpretation, especially for attachment and detachment.

New in v 2.13 (released 8/30/2012)

• Bug fix: You can now merge free ink into glyphs again.

New in v 2.12 (released 6/29/2012)

• The CogSketch main window now provides nice graphical buttons for commonly performed actions.
• Improved tutorials and sample sketches.
• Added a quick start guide.
• Worksheet file extension is now "skw" (was "sk").
• Design sketch file extension is now "skd" (was "sk").
• All other kinds of sketches still use the "sk" file extension.
• Made the glyph-select and ink-select tools more distinct.
• Various incomplete or unused concepts used in Design Coach to label glyphs have been removed. All concepts also have new, more helpful descriptions.
• Improved the speed of Design Coach feedback generation for many cases.
• Improved surface contact detection in Design Coach.
• You can now use double-click to display the glyph properties dialog when using the ink-select tool, just like you could with the glyph-select and drawing tools.
• It's now easier to change the color of glyphs -- just select one or more and click a color on the toolbar.
• Various other improvements to the user-interface.
• Glyph properties dialog should pop up a bit faster now.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the error "wgl:MakeCurrent failed ..." if using CogSketch through remote desktop during batch history report creation with Phone Home enabled.
• Press-and-hold for right-click on pen-enabled computers is now enabled by default on CogSketch drawing windows. This causes a bit of a delay when starting to draw, so we originally had it disabled by default, but enough users wanted that feature in spite of the delay, so we now have it enabled unless you disable it in the CogSketch preferences.

New in v 2.11 (released 5/11/2012)

• History reports give more detailed timing information for glyphs drawn.

New in v 2.10 (released 4/28/2012)

• Improved edge-segmentation.
• The worksheet tutor has a new architecture, providing more flexible encoding of tutoring strategies.
• Improved heuristic for determining which actions were done by the student when creating history reports for worksheets.
• At the request of several of our users, the Windows menu has been added again, making it easier to select windows when many sketches are open!
• Design Coach:
  • The pop-up feedback window has been integrated into the sketching window.
  • Some feedback items can be expanded to show why the feedback was given.
  • There are new feedback items for basic errors, like unfinished glyphs or annotations without a target.
  • Feedback items now refer to tutorial steps, when appropriate.

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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