[IAEP] adding or updating an Activity: two typical teacherscenarios, let's lower barrier to installation

[Kathy Pusztavari]

Sadly I've done number 1 when I first got my XO.  It didn't take long for
someone to tell me that you had to browse and download using the machine
RUNNING sugar and that you had to go to Journal and run the install program.
Once I figured that out it was relatively easy.  Also seemed to work for my
SoaS machines (at least downloading and installing Turtle Typing).

-Kathy

-----Original Message-----
From: iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org
[mailto:iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Sean DALY
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 7:35 AM
To: iaep; Sugar Labs Marketing
Subject: [IAEP] adding or updating an Activity: two typical
teacherscenarios, let's lower barrier to installation

Scenario 1:

Let's say I'm a teacher reading about Sugar in a magazine. I consider myself
comfortable with computers, visit the web every day, but have never used the
command line. I've succeeded in downloading SoaS, loading it onto a stick
with the Fedora LiveUSB Creator and booting my PC with it. I've tried a few
Activities and am wondering what other Activities are available. Later, back
in Windows, I've visited www.sugarlabs.org and found the Activities section.
Browsing by section, I find a couple of Activities that seem interesting.
I've clicked the pancake buttons and downloaded two .xo files and put them
on my hard disk where I usually store the attachments friends and colleagues
send me.


Scenario 2:

A colleague has mentioned Sugar to me, talking about the OLPC project.
I have a Mac for ease of use and I never see a text screen. I visit
www.sugarlabs.org and after reading the "teachers" section with interest, I
return to the homepage and click on "Try Sugar with a child today", arriving
on the page that advises how to install for each system; I click on the
Apple icon. The boot helper instructions seem complicated, but I find the
VirtualBox OSX installation instructions and get Sugar running. I'm
intrigued by the Activities and want to know if there are more, so I switch
to my browser in the other window, return to the Sugar Labs site and find a
very interesting-looking Activity in the website's Activities section. I
click the pancake button and download the .xo file to the Mac's desktop.


******************************
Questions:

1) what are the teachers' next step? Would the procedures be different for
these two scenarii?
* No instructions I could locate on activities.sugarlabs.org :-(
* In the wiki section, I eventually located Activity Library and found a
page called End Users, but two of the three pages are blank and the other
one talks about a sandbox...
* The search engine doesn't help either, there are lots of documents found
but none give advice about how to add an Activity or update to a more recent
one.

2) I think we are assuming Activity installation from within Browse under
Sugar, but that method may be too much to assume for a newbie or for someone
with no net connectivity with Sugar... "automatic" if connected though I
don't remember if a new Activity arrives in the list view or is a
favorite... we need to communicate what to expect in that case

3) Someone told me how to add an Activity by placing the .xo bundle in a
directory... but I can't find the mail :-( and CLI manipulations daunting
for many ordinary users

4) If I remember correctly, a collaborative Activity set to public sharing
is pushed out over the network to other Sugar machines. Are those machines
permanently updated with more recent versions, or installed if new versions,
or merely "borrowed" during the session?

5) if there is a problem, is it possible to roll back to the previous
version of an Activity?

******************************

any info appreciated.

The Marketing Team can help write installation tips copy if necessary.

thanks

Sean
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