[Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

Bobby Powers wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti 
> <mpgritti at gmail.com <mailto:mpgritti at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:32 AM,  <david at lang.hm
>     <mailto:david at lang.hm>> wrote:
>     > what about Sugar software running as well as possible on normal
>     linux
>     > boxes? without having to install the full sugar package and run
>     > everything under sugar in one window. this doesn't mean that some
>     > libraries won't need to be installed, but like running QT apps
>     on a Gnome
>     > desktop, you install the QT libraries, not all of KDE (and similarly
>     > running gtk apps on a KDE destop you don't install all of gnome)
>
>     Not possible at the moment but it's on the plan too.
>
> The way I see it it is somewhat of a two way street.  Personally, if 
> I'm going to run Sugar apps in Gnome I would prefer them to integrate 
> nicely with my other apps, just as I would prefer apps running in 
> Sugar to be 'sugary'.  In this case the burdon falls on the shoulders 
> of the activity developers.  >From what I understand (and please 
> correct me if I'm wrong!) Abiword is a good example - the text editor 
> canvas is encapsolated as its own widget, and both the Gnome Abiword 
> and the sugar activity use it in their respective user interfaces.  So 
> nice modular UI code should make maintaing a Gnome and a Sugar version 
> of a program relatively painless.  Again, please correct me if I'm 
> wrong - I've been planning out what I want to do with a new activity 
> and this is what I seem to have arrived at, if peoples experiences are 
> different it could save me some headache...

I think *platform* integration is great from the user point of view. And 
I think designing the code so that it's easy to provide optimized UI for 
a certain platform is also a good idea.

*But* I also think it should be possible to run a Sugar activity on a 
standard desktop and a desktop application in the Sugar shell. 
Integration is great and we should encourage it, but we can't assume it 
will always happen. And in the cases it doesn't happen, not-integrated 
is better than nothing.

Also keeping the compatibility barrier low between the two platforms 
will make porting and cross pollination of technologies and ideas easier.

Marco