[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2011-12-07

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. I was on a flight from Miami to Boston with Reuben Caron last night
during which we discussed the hot-button topic of Flash games. Reuben
was on his way back from a deployment that was heavy into Flash and
was looking for a way to wean itself from a dependency on deprecated
software that was both opaque and power hungry. Having just finished
porting a Flash game to Sugar--it really is not so difficult--I
suggested that we encourage the deployment to Sugarize their Flash
assets. So we took a quick scan through their library and chose a
reflective-symmetry game as a place to start. Two hours later, we had
Reflection [1] running in Sugar. Version 2, which I wrote on the train
into Cambridge this morning includes collaboration and a mode of
symmetry not available in the original Flash game.

Ultimately, it comes down to sustainability. It is my opinion that
deployments are capable of building capacity and writing simple Sugar
activities that they can tailor to their needs is a skill that pays
off in the short term--no need to sustain Flash--and the long
term--they learn to build tools to solve problems.

2. I've been busy this week with some other programming tasks as well:
enhancing Measure and Turtle Art to take advantage of stereo input:
both analog audio and DC resistance modes. As a result, you can now
attach multiple sensors to the microphone input of an XO 1.5 and read
two channels of data. I wrote a simple Turtle Art program [2] to paint
using a photo-resistor and a mechanical switch. Try doing that in
Flash!!

3. Christofer is doing more Sugar hacking (See [3]).

4. Aleksey Lim has gotten multilingual chat working again on the Sugar
IRC channels (Well, just bilinugual for the moment: Spanish and
English). Instructions on how to use the service are found here [4].
Translation is provided by the Apertium project [5]. The project
accepts contributions [6] to their translation system--those of you
who are bilingual should please try to help.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list:

2011 Nov 26th-Dec 2nd (45 emails) [7]

Visit our planet [8] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.


-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Reflection
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:TAdual-sensor-mode.png
[3] https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/303924_152746174826035_100002719595747_169168_604539697_n.jpg
[4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Service/meeting/Usage#Multi-lingual_relaying
[5] http://apertium.org
[6] http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Contributing_to_an_existing_pair
[7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Nov-26-Dec-2-som.jpg
[8] http://planet.sugarlabs.org