[IAEP] one click operation (was: Sugar Digest 2011-12-01)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Carlos,

> The only reason I offered a link to the game "Circle-the-Cat" was to offer an example of an easy to use application.
> What I meant by that is that you are already using it after a single clic on the link I sent.  
> No downloading or installation is required.  It works with any computer connected to internet (or to a school server??),  using any operating system.

There are three different factors which combine to create an overall
user experience:

1) different levels of taking care of the details, which is the issue
you are brought up a few times. Just to reinforce the example Alan gave,
I once developed a tool for very technical users (an assembler for the
Z80 processor) in a single afternoon and it was used successfully by
several people in a company for two years. At that point it was decided
that it might be interesting to sell this to others, and it took me
nearly two months of "cleaning it up" before I felt it was ready for
others to use (where these others were expected to be technical people
like ourselves and not normal people).

A good example is comparing Etoys with Scratch. Both are built on the
same base technology and so share many of the same advantages and
limitations. Yet Scratch is more of a one click operation in terms of
sharing projects. The Etoys people are fully aware of this, but simply
don't have the resources that MIT has to close the gap.

2) "no downloading or installation" depends greatly on what your
computer already has in it. Your cat example didn't work on my iPhone,
for example. Actually, the Javascript part did work but then it tried to
download a Flash part. There is nothing natural about a computer
environment, but we can take the particular one we use for granted.
Microsoft used this to their advantage by pre loading Internet Explorer
into Windows while Netscape had to be downloaded.

Your particular example is downloaded into the user's computer and then
runs entirely locally without any connection to the Internet. So it
could just as easily come from a CD-ROM as from a web site. In your
translation example, on the other hand, the one click experience comes
from the fact that the application is installed on a remote server and
your computer is a mere terminal. That is a good way to do thing, but
Sugar and OLPC have the goal of being usable even without an Internet
connection (though they are even more usable with it). An intermediate
solution is to have one server per school while the students use
terminals. There are actually several interesting educational projects
based on this (you need at least one very technical user per school to
keep the server running).

http://www.slx.no/

3) at any given point in time there is an "industry darling" which can
do a lot of bad stuff and people will overlook it even though they would
find the same thing unacceptable from any other competitor. In the
microcomputer industry this was IBM in the 1980s, Microsoft in the 1990s
and now is Apple. So I watched people give up on Linux after playing
with it a few minutes because pressing the button on the CD-ROM drive
didn't eject the disk, yet they stuck with Windows though they had to
reformat their disk three times, one of which caused them to lose half
of their data. I watched someone give up on OpenOffice because
control-alt-S didn't do exactly what they were used to but they have
since switched to the new MS Office with its drastically changed GUI and
which is missing quite a few of the old options and commands.

> My question is now:
> ¿Do the children have the time to wait until Sugar is easily usable by everyone,  not geeks only?

Problem 3 is not something that can be worked on, but justing giving
Sugar to more children than people who use Windows or some other system
will tend to change perceptions. People find whatever they are used to
easy and intuitive.

Problem 2 shouldn't happen on the OLPC for Sugar, but of course is a
complication everywhere else (so you have Sugar On A Stick and other
such efforts).

Problem 1 takes a lot of resources, and is something SugarLabs seems to
worry about.

Given that the children already have OLPC machines with Sugar pre
installed, I don't see the problem. Is it complicated to run new
activities beyond those pre loaded in a given distribution? Is the
problem that the teachers are using Windows machines? Do you feel that
the people now working to improve Sugar should instead write Flash
applications?

-- Jecel