[Sugar-devel] Feedback on SoaS

[James Simmons]

I haven't actually tried SoaS-Beta-1 (I'm assuming this is different 
from what was released on the 10th) but I do have some leftover comments 
based on what I saw last week.

One thing we have to consider with Sugar on a Stick is that for many, 
maybe most people it will be their first experience of Sugar.  We need 
to consider that when we choose what Activities to install by default.  
We want Activities that make a good first impression.  By that, I mean 
Activities that a kid can click on the icon to bring them up and start 
fooling around with them without having to read instructions first.

I am flattered as hell that View Slides made the cut, but as its author 
I say it is a lousy choice.  Read Etexts, which is not included but 
which I believe Aleksey Lim was thinking about including, would have 
been equally bad.  To actually use these Activities you need to read the 
website first.  You can't just click on their icons and get them to do 
anything useful.  To use View Slides you need to have some content in 
the Journal, it has to be in the correct format, and you have to do 
something non-obvious to Resume it.  View Slides doesn't make a good 
first impression.

In contrast to that, the Tam Tam Activities make a *much* better first 
impression but are not included.

Pippy might be a better choice than Develop, for similar reasons.  Pippy 
has built in code samples ready to try out.  Develop does not.  Also, on 
the machines I tried Develop used a *very* small font in the edit window.

I notice Read is not included.  Now Read *could* be something that gives 
a good first impression.  Suppose you had the DJVU evince plugins 
installed, you could perhaps start SoaS with an eBook from the Internet 
Archive already in the Journal.  A good choice might be the beautifully 
illustrated edition of The Wizard of Oz from that website, in either 
djvu or PDF format.  The kid would click on the entry in the Journal, 
and because it uses a MIME type that is only used by Read it would open 
right up.

I'm warming up to the idea of Unified Bundles that was discussed on 
Sugar-devel last week.  If we had that working we could include actual 
books in the Activity Ring and properly show off what Sugar could do 
with plain text files, slide shows, etc.

Until then I would prefer that kids find out about Read Etexts and View 
Slides from http://activities.sugarlabs.org/.  They'll have a better 
idea what to expect from them if they read about them on that website first.

James Simmons