[Sugar-devel] Colors! Activity status

[chm]

On 12/23/2010 11:58 AM, Wade Brainerd wrote:
 > Hey Chris,
 >
 > On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:13 PM, chm wrote:
 >
 >     I've built a wacom tablet kernel driver for
 >     10.1.3beta and have been able to run Colors! with
 >     a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet. This was the first
 >     time since leaving os802 on the XO-1. Yippee!
 >
 > Wonderful! I wonder if OLPC would be up for including
 > your module in future distributions by default. Wacom
 > Bamboo tablets are easily within reach of most school
 > budgets and add to the experience of many activities,
 > not just Colors!.

The latest release adds support for SiS USB to VGA
adapter for external monitor display.  Now that the
XO-1 and XO-1.5 are synched in OS development again,
a good case could be made for having wacom support.

The driver/xorg.conf that I did definitely need some
work to be worthy of official release status.  I don't
think it will be too difficult, especially if Ping is
available for consult/assist.

Things I would like to see before an official
tablet driver/support release for the XO-1:

  (1) work with latest linuxwacom install
  (2) support hotplug-ing of the tablet
  (3) handle suspend/resume appropriately
  (4) check out on XO-1.5 (I don't have one)

 >     I notice some problems with a solid,
 >     full-pressure/full-size dot at the beginning of
 >     a stroke. That was fixed previously by some of
 >     the tablet driver settings but I don't recall the
 >     details.
 >
 > I believe I tried to work around this in the Colors!
 > code at some point too. We were getting some
 > extraneous mouse signals with no pressure data, which
 > Colors! interprets as full pressure.

I think there were also some configuration things
in the xorg.conf file.  I thought there was one
related to the minimum pressure settings.  I'll
look through my emails from 2008/2009.

 >     Also, I used the Copy widget to save a drawing
 >     to the clipboard and thence to the Journal.
 >     Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to save
 >     the "playable" version of the drawing to the
 >     Journal.
 >
 > Just stop the activity, the Journal entry for the
 > activity contains the strokes. Or did you want the
 > .drw file to say, upload to the Colors! gallery?

I think that the .drw file should be savable as
a journal entry since that appears to be the
basic element of reproducing a Colors! session.
It could be saved in the Journal with a thumbnail
of the image which would allow upload/share/save
of students work with each other.

The Journal is a *great* idea but it is hampered
by the inability to deal with "just files".  By
putting in the support you'll allow all Sugar
activities to access/reference Colors! sessions.

I know my nieces would love it if their drawings
could be turned into a slide show and/or a movie
for display.

 >     Finally, I downloaded the git sources from the
 >     gitorious and I think I'll be able to figure out
 >     how to get more of the wacom tablet features
 >     available. Specifically, the Bamboo has a
 >     Ring that could be used to dial for the color
 >     selector.

 >     There are a number of other buttons as well that
 >     could be used to reduce/eliminate the need to go
 >     to the XO keyboard while drawing. It would be
 >     cool if one could draw while in e-book mode for
 >     the XO-1.
 >
 > That would be awesome - I'd love to see the hue /
 > saturation / value assigned to those. My tablet only
 > has linear sliders. I wonder how the mapping should
 > work?

The nice thing is that the wacom driver will let
us enumerate the types of buttons and sliders
and model information for the attached tablet(s).
We should be able to not only use the best mapping
for a given tablet but also be able to give a
"tool tips" context menu to show the options...

 > If you'd like to collaborate on this, I have a couple
 > weeks off after the Holidays and am hoping to get
 > some activity work done.

I would be interested in helping and will have a
couple of variants of Wacom tablets to test with:
2 Bamboo Funs, a serial Intuos.  I took a look at
the gtk.gdk PyGtk bindings and it looks like
everything we need is there already---it just needs
to be applied.

Some Colors! related enhancement thoughts:

  (1) What happened to videopaint?  Now that the
      X display on the XO-1 support scaling, it
      should be possible to make the video part
      work again.

  (2) It would be nice to import a photo from
      a/the camera as a starting point for
      drawing (e.g. the tracing paper mode we
      discussed last go around).

  (3) Update the Sugar Activity page to correctly
      describe the actual activity.  It seems a
      number of features no longer work or were
      pulled from the release.

Cheers,
Chris