[sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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Martin Sevior wrote:
| Hi Folks,
|         Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we
| haven't put the UI in to enable it.

I would like an additional control for background color.  Eben, what do
you think?

| I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea
| though. The document will quickly become a mess.  Though if the kids
| want to do this they can.

Have you used Gobby?  It's the shared editor that people at OLPC
_actually_ use, and having per-user background colors is among its key
features.  The colors are stripped for print; clearing the text colors in
a Write document is similarly easy.

Per-user coloring could work even better in Write, because text has a
foreground and background color, and each user also has a foreground color
and a background color that appear all over the UI.  Those colors are
guaranteed to have good contrast against each other, as required in the
rest of the UI.  Automatically setting the user's text to those settings
in a shared Write session would make it instantly obvious who is typing what.

I would most prefer a design in which the scheme is black on white by
default.  When the first user shares the document, the text entry colors
are converted to her XO colors, but the existing text is not altered.  As
each user joins, that person's colors are set to their XO colors, but
users may modify their color settings at any time after join+share.

It occurs to me that this may work best if colors can be made more
"sticky", so that anything I type keeps my current colors, not the colors
of the text I've selected or am typing into.  This is a tricky UI
question, which I will leave to the UI folks.  Perhaps a "sticky" checkbox
next to the color selectors that checks itself upon sharing?

- --Ben
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