Steve and Tommy walked through the app’s code and talked about app development for about an hour.
Tommy will set up an app development environment on his Windows laptop. This is non-trivial. The app’s source code resides in a cloud-based repository called GitHub. One must create an account on GitHub and from there fork the app’s “repo”. To clone the code from the GitHub forked repository on a Windows laptop one must first install Git For Windows. If Windows PowerShell (it’s a better command line tool) isn’t installed it will need to be. Next one must install Dart and Flutter (the language and framework the app is built in), Android Studio (which includes the simulator for Android phones), and VSCode (the text editor). When that is in place, one can run VSCode and edit the project’s source files. Errors encountered along the way can be resolved by pinging Steve, from YouTube videos, with Google searchers or AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini.
Steve will make our existing Tokovinine glyphs suitable for the new writing feature. This requires changing the white background pixels to transparent. These glyphs should continue to work with the Decode Glyph Block feature which already uses a white background.
Tommy will write some Dart code that uses the app’s existing list of glyph objects to convert latin alphabet phonetic sounds to Mayan glyphs.
Steve will give Tommy permission to a second GitHub repo that holds the app’s assets (glyph image files, audio recordings, etc.).