[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-06-23

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. The last few weeks, I have been working with Cynthia Solomon, one
of the inventors of Logo, who have been giving me great feedback on
Turtle Art. She has mostly focused on Turtle Art Mini [1] (the version
that most closely parallels Brian Silverman's Turtle Art project). At
her suggestion, I have enhanced the named action block and named box
block: when you create a named stack, a new block appears on the
palette for that action; similarly, when you name a box, a new block
appears on the palette for accessing that block. I really like the
simplicity with which this enables one to extend the block library of
Turtle Art.

2. At the urging of Manuel Kaufmann I added a long-overdue feature to
the Measure Activity: the ability to tune instruments. Guzman Trindad,
a teacher in Uruguay, has been giving me feedback in this development.
I think we have a pretty decent tool in Version 41 [2]. It lets you
select a note by name or frequency or instrument and displays a tuning
line a the frequency-base scale. It also provides a read out of
whether or not you are flat, sharp, or in tune. More details are
available on the Measure Activity home page [3].

3. I had a nice meeting with Teemu Leinonen from Alto University last
week. Teemu was in town for a conference, where he was presenting his
work on TeamUp [4], a really nice classroom collaboration project. It
is a web based tool for recording the progress of teams working on
group projects. I was inspired to write a new activity to enable
groups of learners to pool their efforts and record shared audio
notes. Think of it as Portfolio shared among multiple users. While
still a work in progress: I hope to have a preliminary release later
in the week.

4. Daniel Drake has announced the first release candidate of the new
12.1.0 software release for the XO. It features Sugar 0.96 running on
Fedora 17. Details can be found on wiki.laptop.org [5]. Quick links
for download are:
* XO 1.75 [6]
* XO 1.5  [7]
* XO 1.0  [8]

5. Daniel Francis, a youth from Uruguay, has joined Developer Team
meetings and will be mentored by Sascha Silbe in reviewing patches to
Sugar itself. A nice example for other aspiring contributors.

6. Chris Leonard and Simon Schampijer report that Glucose 9.96
branches have been created in Gitorious and matched on Poolte for the
beginning of the 0.97>0.98 cycle.

7. Irma Alvarez and Edgar Quispe continue to make progress on Quechua
and Aymara. Meanwhile, there seems to be renewed interest in Maori.
Please contact Chris if you have interest in contributing to these (or
any other of our language projects).

8. Sugar Labs is funding Manuel Quiñones airfare to GUADEC for a GTK3
hackfest with Simon Schampijer and Carlos Garnacho. OLPC is picking up
his other expenses. We anticipate good synergy between the Sugar team
and the GNOME 3 community and a boost to our efforts in migrating to
GTK-3.

9. Daniel Narvaez, with help from Bernie Innocenti, has gotten a
buildbot running. Nightly build results from the sugar core can be
found at [9].

=== Sugar Labs ===

Visit our planet [10] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

-walter

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

----

[1] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4298
[2] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4197
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Measure
[4] http://teamup.aalto.fi/
[5] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/12.1.0
[6] http://download.laptop.org/xo-1.75/os/candidate/12.1.0-14/
[7] http://download.laptop.org/xo-1.5/os/candidate/12.1.0-14/
[8] http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/12.1.0-14/
[9] http://buildbot.sugarlabs.org
[10] http://planet.sugarlabs.org