Geek 2.0

A year ago, I quickly developed a small application to learn my kid to use a keyboard and create words by typing letters. The application shows a word (usually the first name of a family member) and he must type the same word by clicking on the keyboard letters.

The application is providing sound-based feedbacks to pronounce the first name and each letter typed.

I used Java and Swing, the result is showed in the screen shot below.

Pretty simple but highly effective, my 4 years old boy loves to play this little game.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I am a software guy, not an graphical artist.

When JavaFX came in last December, I wanted to see how easy (or not) it would have been to re-write this application with a somewhat more appealing and modern graphical user interface.

The result is this new application, entirely similar in terms of functionalities but with a different look and feel.

I also added some animations, the letter symbols zoom in and out when the mouse is over the letter and the box is highlighted when the user clicks on it.

There is more or less 500 lines of JavaFX code needed to write this application, roughly 20% less lines of code than the “equivalent” Swing application.

For the curious, you can download the source code.