[Its.an.education.project] Making Sugar independent of OLPC

[Bernie Innocenti]

Russ Nelson wrote:
> Excellent news.  Sugar on the XO has been somewhat ill-received.  Part
> of that is simply because it isn't derived from Unix (as are all
> modern operating systems).  Part of that is because performance on the
> XO is a little lacking.

The Sugar developers have started looking at performance improvement
only very recently.  And they already made some good progress in the
so-called "faster" branch.  Lack of engineering resource has been
constraining our ability to do more.

But yes: performance (both real and perceived) is still is a major
limiting factor for Sugar on the XO.  Users rarely point finger at
speed, but it subliminally influences their judgment and you can tell
by their facial expressions while they're waiting for an activity to
load.

We also _are_ derived from UNIX in a sense, because we are derived
from Linux.  On the other hand, our novel UI concepts required the
definition of a few Sugar-specific guidelines:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_tutorial
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_an_activity


> But these are surmountable problems, and I
> think we need to explore different paradigms for user interfaces.

Yes, especially for educational purposes, because the traditional
paradigms seem quite unfit for little kids and impair learning rather
than facilitating it.

By the way, don't judget Sugar from its current implementation.
There was no time to do everything we wanted:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines

Eben has also been working on a revised UI design, but I can't
find the relevant wiki page.

-- 
   \___/
  _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"