[sugar] project idea - any takers?

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Pol,

At Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:52:42 -0400,
Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:
> 
> I admit this kind of (very) late, but here is a project idea that I 
> would love to mentor:
> 
> Depending on your coding skills you could write a small activity to 
> abstract the process of writing simple network applications that involve 
> various hardware parts of the laptop (sound card, camera, microphone, 
> network card). This activity would allow children to synthesize simple 
> network programs like "when my laptop hears a sound, send an email to my 
> friend X", "if you receive a message (packet) from this friend, take a 
> picture and send it to my other friend Y".... For example a child may 
> "write" small program using your activity to detect a sound and when it 
> does, it will take a picture and send it somewhere over email (a nifty 
> little monitoring system).
> 
> Children should be able to put together simple programs like that in "a 
> la etoys", by drag-n-drop of icons on screen and setting their 
> properties, making loops and so on.

  Yeah, if the idea is "a la etoys", just add tiles to (for example)
existing Email client in Squeak/Etoys so that the kids can set
address, content, subject, etc. and send emal.  For sound and stuff,
it is almost there.  That would be a practical project as a SoC.

  What I hoped was that the Sugar Activities are "objects"; I mean
that to an Activity you can send the (DBus) messages and the object
does something (a la AppleScript but the communication is via DBus),
and the kids can make mix different Activities to make his own (the
user experience would resemble Etoys but Sugar Acitivities and Sugar
commands.)  That would help better separation of Activities (as they
live in different address space), and the messages could be audited so
security implication could be addressed.

-- Yoshiki