[Sugar-devel] Feedback on SoaS

[Walter Bender]

All very good suggestions, thanks.

Please do try the new Beta, as it fixes a number of issues with the
version from the 10th, including many sound and network problems.

-walter

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 5:21 PM, James Simmons
<jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org