[Sugar-devel] Feedback on SoaS

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 23:21, 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.

In http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/768

> 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.

Created http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/767

> 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.

The idea was that viewer activities like Read, Read ETexts, etc would
not appear in the favorites window. They are installed (can see in the
activities list), but will be launched only once the user tries to
view some content from the journal.

Has been suggested that we ship some files already in the journal.

> 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.

Sounds good, please keep opening tickets so people are reminded about it.

Thanks,

Tomeu

> James Simmons
>
>
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