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

[david at lang.hm]

On Fri, 9 May 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:

> 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.

thank you, this is exactly what I am hoping for.

David Lang