Leopard v2.1
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The following post was taken from the official Leopard blog.
It’s been about six months since WeatherBug and I became partners in distributing my beginner’s programming language called Leopard as a trial version through their network. During that time, we’ve received some fantastic and encouraging feedback from the users, and over the past few months, work has been done on developing the next version of Leopard, and in turn, the first full version for distribution by WeatherBug. Now that the development work on the latest version has been completed, I’m happy to announce that Leopard v2.1 is finally ready for the public!
This version expands on many of the things that we started to demonstrate with the trial version, and implementation with WeatherBug’s data is now far more complete. Not only do you have access to more weather data, but the flexibility that you have with that data has also improved.
Of course, at its core, Leopard is a programming language, and we’ve added more features that will open up new doors in terms of what you can create with the tool. One notable addition is that you can now embed content from the Internet directly in your applications, and this helps to bridge the gap between the Internet and the desktop.
We’re not ready to start taking orders for the registered version just yet, but we wanted to spread the word and let everyone know that they can now give the latest version a try. Please let us know what you think, and if you’re a member of the educational community, then I’d love to speak with you. To get started, just download the latest version of Leopard and check out the included sample applications and the User Guide. Once you’ve developed your own programs, be sure to submit them to us so that we can share your work with the community.
Thanks for your support!
[tags]Leopard, Brandon Watts, WeatherBug, Programming, Education, Schools, Students, Teachers[/tags]
2 Comments
Sean
May 10th, 2007
at 5:50am
Nifty concept, but geez a partnership with WeatherBug I’m not sure about. Their program while useful to some, is one of the worst resource hogs of come across. As a computer technician I can’t tell you how many computers I’ve come across where the complaint was that it was slowing to a crawl for no reason and WeatherBug was foudn to be the culprit, and the odler versions were very hard to remove with the uninstaller leaving lots of excess files.
Chris
May 17th, 2007
at 10:05pm
Sean, I am one of the founders of WeatherBug and wanted to respond to you.
We are working with Brandon on Leopard because we are not just about a desktop application. Our company was founded as a K-12 educational company. Schools are our primary customers that purchase the WeatherBug weather stations and they also use our curriculum and materials to teach meteorology.
Weather is a great subject that really gets students excited to learn..not just about the weather, but math and geography as well. As a software developer and father of 4 kids, I have an interest in teaching programming and I think that combining weather and programming is a way to make the subject exciting for kids…or anyone for that matter.
I think what Brandon has done with Leopard is amazing because you can create such a rich interface with a very simple language. At first we started with the capability to add WeatherBug widgets into the application and have now expanded that to include any “embeddable” web content like you see on iGoogle, or youTube and many other sites.
I think it is a really cool idea and I hope you take the time to give it a try!
Chris