[sugar] First time Sugar user's experiences

[Teus Benschop]

>> Well, hmm, that probably is the case in an ideal world, ideal in the 
>> sense that software writers are going to stick to Sugar's handling of 
>> activities. But we're going to use the OLPC for other computing tasks in 
>> Africa, where the main thing is not gui, but that there is no power. The 
>>     
>
> That begs the question, why use sugar for these tasks at all then?  Why
> do you need a GUI if you're just going to be using the command-line for
> these things?
>
> If you do want a GUI for stuff, it seems like a terrible hack to drop to
> a terminal for things that users are going to be expected to do quite a
> bit.  Can you describe your use-case here in a bit more detail?
>   

The application I am thinking about, and developing, is Bibledit 
(bibledit.sourceforge.net), an editor in use by Bible translators, who 
often go into areas without power. It is a Gtk application with a GUI, 
but does not conform to the guidelines of Sugar how activities should 
work. For example, it expects stuff in /usr/share/bibledit, and is 
installed normally in /usr/bin. According to the sugar guidelines, it 
should use relative paths for everything. It now stores it's data in 
$HOME/.bibledit, so not a relative path. At present it runs on the OLPC, 
with Sugar and all, but it has to be installed by root to get it on. It 
even copies a library or two to /usr/lib. To get this application 
started, one needs to have a terminal, and type "bibledit". A terminal 
would not be needed if Sugar allows for starting binaries by hand, 
similar to pressing Alt-F2 on Linux. We wish to give people this 
application, but I wonder whether it is worth the whole rewrite to make 
it confirming to an activity. Hence the terminal is good to have, just 
for a start, and we'll see later. And I guess that Bibledit is not the 
only applications that is going to start off like that. Sugar still is 
needed for other tasks, such as web browsing. Yes, I agree that ideally 
Bibledit should become a "native" sugar applications, but probably in a 
later stage.

Regards,

Teus.
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