[sugar] Porting apps, which ones?

[Ian Bicking]

Ivan Krsti? wrote:
> Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>> I never tried myself, my sister mentioned it was very slow... (yeah I'm
>> using her for testing sometimes :P). That was on build 81 I think.
> 
> It's certainly not out of the question to e.g. work with Google on
> making a GTK+ based, Sugar-integrated frontend to GMail, if we have to.
> It's the POP(S)/IMAP(S)/SMTP(S) and related infrastructure that we want
> to avoid.

GMail offers POP access, which is fairly good for intermittent 
connections.  IMAP is better of course, in terms of keeping stuff in 
sync, and I don't think GMail supports that (nor does any free service). 
  Also existing mail client support for IMAP is of spotty quality.

Anyway, potentially a light GTK email client, use POP, and maybe figure 
out a cohesive signup process that sets up all the pieces at once.  At 
least this would let OLPC mostly punt on these issues for rev1, but 
still offer a reasonable experience for intermittent connections, and 
probably with better performance than what Ajax/Javascript can offer.

That leaves open a question about pinging for incoming email, which 
opens up some problems with activities (which aren't meant to just run 
in the background), and potentially some power usage (and network usage) 
questions.

There's also some sticky issues with email and kids and a variety of 
safety issues (technical an social).  I don't know if those effect the 
email implementation...


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org