[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2011-06-28

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. A disconcerting past vision of the future of learning can be found
in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale (French National
Library) website (See
[http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/grand/3_95b1.htm]): efficient
learning equated to efficient transfer of information. Perhaps a
little less unsettling is the vision of personal transportation
([http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/grand/3_95a3.htm]), although I am
still very happy using my 19th century transportation technology, the
bicycle. Seriously, one-to-one computing is first and foremost about
learning: kids learning; teachers learning; communities learning. Gary
Stager, one of the early advocates of one to one does a nice job of
articulating a vision of learning at a recent discussion at the Omar
Dengo Foundation in Costa Rica (See [http://vimeo.com/25700703]).

2. Under the leadership fo Chris Leonard, the Translation Team has
been engaged in upstream and downstream outreach. We are now hosting
PO files for AbiWord and GNASH (See
[http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/upstream_POT]) and PO files
for Waveplace downstream (See
[http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/Waveplace]). We are also
tracking the status of Sugar/OLPC-relevant upstream GNOME and
Translation Project localization bits (See
[http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/upstream_l10n]). Sugar Labs
is now hosting 130 languages and dialects from Acoli to Zulu.

=== In the community ===

3. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold
simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See
[http://www.facultadeducacion.ucr.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=23]).

4. Videos from the TedxKids at Brussels workshops are online at
[http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PLAF5E4FA0923CE190].

=== Tech Talk ===

5. There are a plethora of reasons for us to begin work phasing out
Hippo Canvas. (Hippo Canvas is a GNOME-based toolkit used to implement
the Sugar Desktop and a few other UI elements.)
* Fedora is dropping support for Hippo Canvas, so if we want to
continue using it, we'll have to maintain it ourselves;
* Hippo Canvas won't be supported in gtk3.0 and will thus impede our
efforts to migrate Sugar; and
* Hippo Canvas does not support GNOME accessibility features, making
it difficult to leverage the broader community's accessibility
efforts.
Tomeu Vizoso made a branch of Sugar last year and began efforts to
remove Hippo Canvas from the Sugar Desktop. I am picking up where he
left off, in part motivated by the need to make some changes to the
Journal Detail View in order to accommodate the 800x480 resolution
display used on the Okidata laptop being given to teachers in Uruguay.
In parallel Daniel Drake is jumping head first into the Sugar Toolkit.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Jun-18-24-som.jpg (43 emails)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Jun-11-17-som.jpg (105 emails)

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about
Sugar and Sugar deployments.


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