[Edu-sig] New Crunchy release: 0.9beta1

[Andre Roberge]

Hi Everyone,

The first beta release of the new Crunchy is available on
http://code.google.com/p/crunchy.

(For those that have downloaded some "alpha" version, I must apologize
as the wrong versions were uploaded by mistake by yours truly.)

Crunchy has been rewritten from the ground up since version 0.8.2.
This has allowed us to add *many* new capabilities.

Among the most interesting:

* You can use Crunchy to interact with _ordinary_ Python tutorials
written in html.  That's right, they do not need to have any special
"Crunchy markup" to work with Crunchy.  So, you can now use Crunchy to
browse the official Python tutorial on www.python.org, and try out the
examples using the interpreter inside your browser!    Of course,
adding special Crunchy markup is possible - and, in fact, desirable,
to craft a better learning tutorial.   Thanks to BeautifulSoup,
Crunchy can process almost any web page (except those including
frames)  - although the final result, while functional, can leave to
be desired esthetically speaking.

* Crunchy now uses threads so that long-running processes can occur
simultaneously, without interfering with your browsing experience.

* Simple animations are now possible to do within the graphics environment.

* Crunchy can now work with programs that generate images (thanks
Edin!), and display them on the page. A very simple example using
matplotlib is available in the test section.  (it has a minor bug, as
images need to be generated twice before they can be displayed)

* A better help feature (thanks Bryan!) [type help(str) in an
interpreter to see it in action]

* etc.

It still has a few rough edges and a few quirks but the new Crunchy
promises to provide a much better learning environment than before.

As usual, feedback would be most welcome.

André, for the team

P.S.  What's lacking for the 0.9 final release is added documentation.
 However, interested people on the two lists where this message is
posted, should be familiar enough with Crunchy that they would not
need the documentation to try it out.