[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2013-02-02

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1, Redwood City: Raul Gutierrez Segales, Bernie Innocenti and I have
been busy hacking in a mini Sugar Camp this weekend. Our goal is to
build an interface between the Sugar Journal and several on-line
services. Specifically, Raul and I are working on an interface between
the Journal and Facebook and Bernie is working on an interface between
the Journal and Google Drive.

Here's is where we are at at the moment:

* We have a control panel widget for managing your Facebook account.
[1] It saves a token in .gconf that can be used to make transactions
with Facebook. (We plan to add a section to manage all of the users
online accounts, probably in the manner of the GNOME online account
manager. Suggests (and patches) welcome.)

* We have a "Share on" extension to the Journal palette menu. [2]
Right now, the only option is to share on Facebook. Raul has written a
class that manages a Facebook object consisting of the Journal preview
image, the title, and the description. The preview image is uploaded
as a photo object to the Sugar Journal album on Facebook. The title
and description are added as a comment. (Question for the design team:
can we bump up the resolution of the preview image?)

* We are finishing up work on two extensions to the Journal
detail-view toolbar for Journal entries with corresponding Facebook
entries. The Refresh Button grabs comments from Facebook and adds them
to the Object description. The Like Button grabs likes from Facebook.

We've also explored using Facebook graph objects, which would open up
a number of interesting options, but we have some infrastructure and
authentication issues to sort through before we go too far down that
path.

We'll be uploading patches [3] and [4] pretty regularly throughout the weekend.

2. I blogged about a cool visualization of prime factors last week
[5]. Tony Forster and I coded it up in Turtle Blocks [6]. Quite fun.
It uses a simple iteration to calculate the prime factors and then a
recursive algorithm to render the factors in a tree, e.g., 25=5x5 [7].
It cycles through the factors of 2 through 100, but it is easy enough
to change the main loop to cycle through whatever range of numbers
you'd like. It takes advantage of the on-the-fly box definition
mechanism in Turtle Blocks and the ability to reference a box from the
value in another box to manage the state as it changes in the
recursion [8]. Note that you can vary the playback speed by moving the
mouse up or down on the screen.

=== In the community ===

3. When visiting Facebook's campus in Menlo Park, we bumped into Chris
Blizzard, formerly the Red Hat project manager for Sugar.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Visit our planet [9] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

---

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/f/f8/Fb-cpsection.png
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/5/5c/Fb-share-on-fb.png
[3] git://git.sugarlabs.org/+redwood-city/sugar/social-sugar.git
[4] git://git.sugarlabs.org/+redwood-city/sugar-artwork/social-sugar-artwork.git
[5] http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/
[6] http://git.sugarlabs.org/turtleart/mainline/blobs/raw/master/samples/math-prime-factors.ta
[7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/7/7e/25%3D5x5.png
[8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/f/fe/Boxbox.png
[9] http://planet.sugarlabs.org


-walter

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