[sugar] Sophie and the XO

[John J5 Palmieri]

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 09:48 -0800, Steven W. Riggins wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> My name is Steve Riggins and I am working on the Sophie project  
> (http://www.sophieproject.org).  Along with Michael Rueger and Nick  
> Matelan, I have been charged with ramping up quickly on the  
> requirements for Sophie running on the XO.  SJ mentioned that this  
> was a good place to do as such, so here we are. :)
> 
> We are very excited about the possibility of having a role in this  
> project!  In order to determine the possibilities, here is a first  
> round of basic questions:

Very nice stuff.

> language support
> ---------------
> 
>    * How many languages does the XO OS support?

Depends on who signs deals for laptops. 

A list of languages for target countries can be found here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Languages

Right now we support  
US International
Arabic
Thai
Spanish (Argentine)
Nigerian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Urdu (Pakistan)

or at least those are the key mappings we have implemented.

>    * Are there input managers for getting multi-byte characters from  
> the user?

Gtk+ provides interfaces to a number of input methods. 

>    * Do you require right-to-left rendering for v1?

Pango, our main text rendering library, supports right-to-left and up
and down.  Being that we are supporting Arabic I think we would need
this support.

> Authoring
> --------
> 
>     * Are you looking for both an Authoring tool as well as a Reader  
> on the XO, or only a Reader?  (I like to be very clear about things)

Both though a reader would be the first priority.

> Documentation
> -------------
> 
>    * How is documentation for software on the XO being distributed?
> 
> Fonts
> -----
> 
>    *  If you would like to develop books for the XO on Mac/Windows/ 
> Linux using Sophie, is requiring the author to use a specific font  
> set acceptable?  Opposed to embedded any font in the book (bloating  
> books, etc)

I think this is acceptable.

> Deliverables
> ----------
> 
>    * When do you need a beta version?
>    * When is gold master to be delivered?
>    * What other milestones would you have for us?
> Video/Movies
> -----------
> 
>    * Which video library are you supporting on the XO?
>    * If you would like to develop books for the XO on Mac/Windows/ 
> Linux using Sophie, are there Mac/Windows versions of the library so  
> everything would be cross platform?

We use ogg Theora right now through the gstreamer library.  Theora is
cross platform.  

> Storage Space
> ------------
> 
>    * How much storage space would we have for the Application,  
> Preferences, caches, temporary files during authoring, etc?

Quick answer is not very much at all.  There is about 200M of space free
on current builds.  One strategy is to actively promote space saving
formats like using SVGs over jpgs and pngs for illustrations and using
csound's midi abilities for sound.  

It would be really nice if an authoring tool could import scores created
in TamTam or content from other applications on the machine.
Applications should all work well together.
 
-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>