[Sugar-devel] ActivityTeam meeting on Friday June 26th - 17:00 UTC

[Gabriel Eirea]

>>> Maybe.  Stand back, what the heck is Activities/All for?  I marked the
>>> page obsolete and nobody has disagreed. ...
>>
>> Someone disagreed quite enthusiastically the other day.  Their
>> rational was that deployments still refer to /All as their primary
>> download page.
>
> Are you referring to Gabriel Eirea's message
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-June/015446.html ?
>
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Gabriel Eirea<geirea at gmail.com> wrote:
>> However, at least here in Uruguay, most of the kids and teachers rely on
>> Activities/All as a starting point to get new activities. This is because
>> Browse's home page had a link to the Activities page. It was very
>> frustrating when most of the activities were moved from Activities to
>> Activities/All without a proper communication to the users. I would not like
>> to see that happen again.
>
> I didn't make that change, I don't know the history.  As the
> Activities page acts as the fallback for the Sugar control panel's
> Software update in 8.2.x, I believe it would be bad if it listed lots
> of activities.
>
> Gabriel, now that http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities prominently
> points users to a.sl.o, how is that working out?
> Someone removed the Activities/translations bar from this page, feel
> free to add it back and/or to update the Spanish-language
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Actividades to point to a.sl.o.

Thank you for taking my comments into consideration. I would like to
clarify that, as stated in my previous message, I believe this is an
issue that falls into deployer's responsabilities (in our case,
Ceibal). However, given that all uruguayan kids received a laptop in
which Browse's homepage was in English and pointed to an English
activities page, not to mention that in the first batch many
activities were not even translated, this is clearly not one of
Ceibal's main concerns.

At the time most of the activities were moved from Activities to
Activities/All there were screams all over the country, kids
complained that they couldn't find their favorite activities anymore,
etc. I wrote to this list and someone kindly added the link to
Activities/All which partly solved the problem.

Now the link has been removed and I'm afraid this would create
problems again. I'll try to get some feedback on how is this working
out.

One more comment: kids are hungry for games, all types of games, all
the time, there is no way to satisfy them. They don't want just the
"finished" activities, they want the simple pacman clone and tetris
clone and all the student scratch-based games that only appear in
Activities/All. Now that Ceibal is installing Flash 10 by default,
maybe they will get busy with online casual games and sugarized games
are not important any longer. However, they not always have
connectivity, especially at home, so there will always be an important
demand for sugarized games.

>> This is because
>> Browse's home page had a link to the Activities page.
> I'm curious, is the OLPC's Browse's home localized in Spanish?  I
> suspect it is not, despite the sophisticated multilingual templating
> system in 8.2.x that gets re-run on each collection download to
> rebuild the home page.

Again, it is trivial to create a customized homepage and this should
be done by the deployment. In our case, this didn't happen.

Regards,

Gabriel