[IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3

[Tim McNamara]

On 4 June 2010 06:21, Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

> On 06/03/2010 01:45 PM, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>
> > My suggestion would be to first convene a "ground up rethink" of what
> > a touch-based Sugar could be.
> ...
> >  The result should be a
> > *book*, which describes the ideal UI.  That will be the long term
> > (think, next decade!) goals for Sugar.
>
> That's a nice idea, but we have a deadline.  In a year or less, OLPC needs
> a release-quality OS build for touch-screen tablet.  People can also
> engage in some long-term dreaming, but OLPC cannot wait for it.
>
> Getting to something _good_ in a year is going to happen by incremental
> improvement, even if there were real money available for development (and
> I haven't heard of any big $$ so far).  The immediate interesting question
> to me is whether that incremental improvement is best started from current
> Sugar, or whether there is something to be gained by starting from Meego,
> or some other effort.
>
> --Ben
>

Meego does look like a highly attractive option from my external
perspective. For one, there are significant dollars behind that project.
I've also been very curious as Moblin has always appeared to me to be very
Sugar-ish: mainly greyscale interface with coloured highlights that is
highly icon driven.

As soon as I heard that OLPC was moving to ARM, I winced slightly. This is
going to make life much more difficult, because of our longstanding Linux,
Python and recent GNOME heritage. What is Sugar Labs' role with the XO-3+?
Will we become simply maintainers of what will be the legacy operating
system for the XO-1.x?

ARM chip architecture makes a lot of sense from a power perspective, but
that was also the case when x86 was chosen for the XO-1. Perhaps even more
so, as Intel has been steadily increasing the power friendliness of its x86
chips, with Atom & so forth.

Still, if the decision has been made, then the decision has been made. I'm
guessing Prof Abelson et al wouldn't have supported a introductory (?)
class[1] and repeat it[2] in Android programming if it was successful.

I guess I'm going to need to learn to love curly braces :/


Tim.


[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/hal/mobile-apps-spring-08
[2] http://people.csail.mit.edu/hal/mobile-apps-fall-08
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