[IAEP] Fwd: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Sugar 0.96 - make it official

Walter Bender walter.bender at gmail.com
Tue May 22 07:04:06 EDT 2012
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Kudos to the devel team!!

-walter


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de>
Date: Tue, May 22, 2012 at 5:25 AM
Subject: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Sugar 0.96 - make it official
To: Sugar Devel <Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>


== Introduction ==
Sugar 0.96 is the new version of the Sugar learning platform. It was
released the 30th of April 2012 (see [1] 0.96 schedule for details).

The main changes in this cycle was the introduction of the new
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 which is the sugar-toolkit ported to use GTK+ 3 and
Pygobject3. Currently Browse, Read, the HellowWorld activity and
Abacus have been ported to the new toolkit.

Besides moving to the new toolkit Browse and related components have
been switching to WebKit as its back-end technology.

The full release notes with nice screen-shots can be found at [2].


== What is new for users ==

===Write to Journal anytime===
This Feature has a long history and many thinking has been going into
this for a few cycles. You can now edit the description of your
current activity session from within the activity. The main goal is to
be able to take notes within the activity context while the activity
is still running. To take notes you can reveal the description palette
from a button in the activity sub-toolbar, it is the same description
field that is used in the Journal detail section. You can edit the
description in both places, as well from within the detail view while
the activity is still running, the description will be updated
accordingly.

The naming alert that prompted the learner for taking notes about the
activity session when closing the activity has been removed.

Thanks to everyone involved in this great feature, the design team and
especially to Walter Bender for his constant effort over several
release cycles to make this happen.

===Global Text to Speech===
The global text to speech feature gives the learner the ability to let
Sugar speak out any selected text in the user interface. It can be
accessed by the speech frame device which has the start/pause and stop
controls. There are options in this palette to adjust the pitch and
rate as well which are restored over boots. For power users the
"alt+shift+s" shortcut has been added to control the speak-back.

Thanks to Gonzalo Odiard for bringing this great Feature to us.

===Browse===
Manuel Quiñones did a lot of work on making inline pdf viewing in
Browse possible using the Evince backend. If the learner clicks on a
pdf file it will open inside the Browse activity in a new tab. At the
bottom of the page there are controls to navigate in the pdf, to
change the view and to save the pdf to the Journal.

===TurtleArt===
Turtle Art advanced from Version 116 to Version 139 over the past
release cycle. Along with many minor bug fixes:
* Cairo conversion, enabling much improved graphics (anti-aliasing,
rotating images and text) and an eventual port to GTK-3
* Overhaul of the plugin mechanism and new plugins for Physics,
Nutrition, Butia, WeDo, NXT, et al.
* Overhaul of the help mechanism to make help more readily available
* New blocks for speak, mouse, and audio
* Improved touch support
Many thanks especially to the Butia team that has done stress-testing
of the plug-in mechanism and as a result led to many improvements.

===Measure===
Measure underwent a major re-factoring to enable stereo capture of
analog audio and digital data.


== What's new for developers ==
The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose
0.96 developer platform:

=== Activity Authors guidelines ===
The most important change is that the GTK+ 2 based sugar-toolkit has
been deprecated. Newly written activities should use
sugar-toolkit-gtk3, which is based on GTK+ 3 and Pygobject3, now.
There will be only bug fixes being available in the future for the old
toolkit no new features will be made available for it and it will
probably go away at one point completely. Detailed guidelines for
porting existing activities can be found at [3].

=== Widgets ===
The Keep button has been removed completely from the API later; please
adjust existing activities accordingly.

=== API ===
In sugar-toolkit-gtk3 API that has been deprecated for several
development cycles have been removed:

* Remove support for the old deprecated toolbar
** removed deprecated imports from the activity module, use the
widgets module instead
** removed the ActivityToolbox class
** removed the Stop button from the ActivityToolbar
** removed set_toolbar/get_toolbar API from the window module
*Datastore: remove deprecated API
*ObjectChooser: remove deprecated parameters
** The objectchooser had the 'title', 'flags' and 'buttons' parameters
deprecated for a long time, remove them now completely. The only
parameters allowed are now the 'parent' and the 'what_filter'.
* Bundlebuilder: remove deprecated bundle_name argument
* Activity: remove deprecated _shared_activity member
* ActivityBundle: clean from deprecated code
** removed deprecated mime type 'application/vnd.olpc-x-sugar'
** activity.info file: removed deprecated field 'service_name' use
'bundle_id' instead
** activity.info file: removed deprecated field 'class' use 'exec' instead


== What's new for packagers ==
* the sugar-toolkit-gtk3 repository has been added
* the Browse activity depend webkitgtk3 instead of xulrunner and
hulahop, the hulahop module has been deprecated


== Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) ==
For the Sucrose 0.96 release, 16 languages are 100% complete (with
respect to the core Glucose module).

Armenian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Dutch, English
(United Kingdom), English (US), French, German, Huastec (Tének),
Nepali, Polish, Portuguese, Sinhala, Spanish, Thai.

An additional 8 languages are greater than 80% complete.

Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Tamil, Vietnamese.

With some localization done on a total of 86 languages.


== Compatibility ==
Activities that has been ported to sugar-toolkit-gtk3 will not run on
older Sugar versions where the new toolkit is not available. Which
means latest Browse and Read will not run on Sugar versions < 0.96.
This is reflected in the activity providing backend ASLO where the
activities are marked 0.96 only.


== Getting the sources ==
If you want to package Sugar for your favorite distribution or just
want to examine Sugar's lovely code here are the released bundles. If
you are interested in the full changelog you can use the Sugar git
repositories.

=== Glucose modules ===
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.96.1.tar.bz2
sugar 0.96.1]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-datastore/sugar-datastore-0.96.0.tar.bz2
sugar-datastore 0.96.0]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit/sugar-toolkit-0.96.1.tar.bz2
sugar-toolkit 0.96.1]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/sugar-toolkit-gtk3-0.96.1.tar.bz2
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 0.96.1]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-base/sugar-base-0.96.0.tar.bz2
sugar-base 0.96.0]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-artwork/sugar-artwork-0.96.2.tar.bz2
sugar-artwork 0.96.2]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-5.0.2403.tar.gz
etoys 5.0.2403]

=== Fructose modules ===
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Pippy/Pippy-46.tar.bz2
Pippy 46]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Browse/Browse-137.tar.bz2
Browse 137]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Calculate/Calculate-40.tar.bz2
Calculate 40]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Etoys/Etoys-116.tar.gz
Etoys 116]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Chat/Chat-76.tar.bz2
Chat 76]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/TurtleArt/TurtleArt-139.tar.bz2
TurtleArt 139]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Jukebox/Jukebox-23.tar.bz2
Jukebox 23]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Log/Log-28.tar.bz2
Log 28]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/ImageViewer/ImageViewer-20.tar.bz2
ImageViewer 20]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Write/Write-79.tar.bz2
Write 79]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Terminal/Terminal-36.tar.bz2
Terminal 36]
* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Read/Read-99.tar.bz2
Read 99]


== How to contribute with testing ==
Sugar 0.96 has been released. We are still stabilizing the areas that
have seen major changes like the new stugar-toolkit-gtk3 the new GTK+
3 Sugar theme and the Browse activity that has been ported to use
Webkit. It is very important to get feedback from and that you report
the bugs you find. The order of stability depends among other things
as well on '''you'''.

If you find bugs please report them into the Sugar Labs bug tracker
[4] indicating the 0.96.x version in the ticket version field. If you
have hardware from OLPC you can use the 12.1.0 builds [5] for the i686
architecture (XO 1 and XO 1.5) and the ARM architecture (XO 1.75).
Those builds include the latest Sugar 0.96.x. Hardware specific bugs
especially with the new 1.75 hardware please report at the
[http://dev.laptop.org/ OLPC bug tracker]. The current development
version is as well available in Fedora 17 [6] and sugar-jhbuild
(sugar* master branches).


==Credits==
This cycle we want to espacially thank the contributors to the GTK+
3/pygobject3 port of the toolkit! All the attendees of the
Gtk3_Hackfest_2011 in Praha and the Rosario meetup our warmest "thank
you". Kudos go to the Palette people!

Many people contributed to this release indirectly, including testing,
documentation, translation, contributing to the Wiki, outreach to
education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we
give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made
this Sugar release possible.

We want to especially thank:
* the [[Infrastructure_Team |  ''Infrastructure team'']] which does
all this great work in the background without which the development
would not be possible at all,

* the ''deployments'' that provide the development team with feedback
from the field,

* the [[Design_Team |  ''Design team'']] which guided the design of
features with UI changes or impact on the workflow,

* the [[Translation_Team |  ''Translation team'']] which makes sure
that Sugar is enjoyable in the local languages of our users,

* the ''developers'' that submit patches for new features and bug
fixes and do review other's patches,

* the ''maintainers'' that make sure their code is shippable and which
provide packagers with new tarballs,

* the ''packagers'' which provide distributions with new Sugar packages,

* the [[Sugar_on_a_Stick | ''SoaS team'']] for providing a Sugar
version to test with during the development cycle,

* the ''testers'' for finding the small and bigger issues,

* the ''release team'' and [[Development_Team | ''Development team'']]
for coordinating those efforts.


== Looking forward to 0.98==
In the 0.98 development cycle the porting of the Shell to GTK+ 3 and
pygobject3 is a major task. Furthermore the remaining bugs in the new
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 should be fixed. We encourage activity developers
to port their activity to the new toolkit and GTK+ 3 and pygobject3.


On behalf of the community who made this possible,
  Simon


[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Roadmap#Schedule
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Notes
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3/Porting
[4] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org
[5] http://build.laptop.org/12.1.0
[6] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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