[sugar] Developing activities.

[Brian Jordan]

Hi David,

I first would like to thank you for your great work on LiveUSB and
documentation-sprinting this past week!

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 12:05 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> For those who have not yet gotten a chance to look at the results of
> Morgs activity developers survey.  It is available at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Morgs/Activities_survey/Recommendations .
> There is a lot of good stuff in there;)
>
> Steps Sugar Labs Should take to improve the situation:  Now that the
> distros are starting to pick up speed, I will focus on activities.  As
> always, help is appreciated and advice is grudgingly accepted.
>
> 1.  Create Sugar-devel at sugarlabs.org mailing list.  We have discussed
> this a few time over the last few months.  Now that we are getting
> distro (other the OLPC) related comments the time seems right
>
> 2. Create Activities-devel at sugarlabs.org mailing list.  This will focus
> on activity developer related issues.
>

I think we have been thinking very similar thoughts -- I had
activities at lists.laptop.org set up on August 12.

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/activities/2008-August/thread.html

If we do use activities-devel at sugarlabs.org as the Sugar activity
development mailing list, could you somehow import the past
conversations from activities at lists.laptop.org into
activities-devel at sugarlabs.org's archives?

Also, irc.freenode.net #olpc-activities has been around since then as
well -- this was used extensively during this past weekend's Physics
Game Jam and tends to have at least a few good activity devs idling.

> 3.  Improve API documentation.  Last week at the Book Sprint, I met a
> professional writer who does Python api documentation for a living.  She
> is willing to help us get our documentation processes set up and get us
> started.
>
> 4.  Work on the getting involved documentation on the Sugar Wiki.
>

Both of these things are very important. Simple, illustrated steps
showing how to create an activity for people with no prior knowledge
of Sugar or the XO would do a lot towards getting new people involved
with an activity development community -- from college
professors/students to deployed-XO owners.

> 5.  Move the Sugar documentation from w.l.o to w.s.o.  When I started
> this move a few moths ago, I am afraid that it was seen as a power grab
> for Sugar Labs.  I will restart this move if I receive buy-in and
> support from OLPC personal.
>

You might look into making parallel (mirroring?) individual wiki pages
as a short-term solution.

> 6. Using AMO as an activities server.  There are many advantages to
> using Amo as an activity server. The issues that i ran into was the need
> to push some patches back to mozilla to abstract the types of files AMO
> serves.  With the patch set, modifing amo to meet our needs would be
> pretty straight forward.  Without the patches being accepted we would
> have to fork the code amo codebase.
>

For the uninitiated, AMO is https://addons.mozilla.org/ . You had
mentioned to me that AMO would work well as an activity data
organization/collection tool and I agree -- it's a fantastic way of
letting authors/users distribute, rate and review activity bundles.
Care must be taken, though -- we should make sure to keep all of the
places that are offering a source for "all Sugar activities" (e.g.,
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities ) up-to-date and make sure that
activity developers are aware that uploading and categorizing in just
one source is not enough to reach all Sugar users (unless we create a
process for doing so automatically or manually) -- especially
considering how the control panel software update tool works.

> thanks
> dfarning

Thanks for your continued efforts towards developing up a thriving
Sugar/activity development community!

Cheers,
Brian


>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar mailing list
> Sugar at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
>