[Sugar-devel] Appearance Customization

Mike Dawson mikeofmanchester at gmail.com
Tue Nov 2 13:18:15 EDT 2010


Hi,

I guess the crux of the issue is the link between the developers (of
whom some are working on deployments and dealing with features that
are important to them) and the ground out in places like here.

If we want to create something more inclusive I'm sure a lot of
deployments would like to help out - but not everyone is able to deal
with FOSS style systems.  Would it be possible that someone could
create a survey that could be given to deployments?  We could
translate it and carry it out here and ask educators, learners etc.
what they want and about their priorities.  That could then be fed to
developers who could do work with their priorities and those of the
outside world known.

In the meantime I still know our kids want their pretty colours!

Re memory usage - we already go through the "please don't open too
many activities" routine all the time - I think it's something that
just takes a little getting used and once they do that they get the
idea.  The other thing is that the background image could well be
optional - just being able to change the colour would make a fair few
people happy.  In particular changing the colour of the buttons /
frame etc.

Some of the conventional GTK themes have user selectable colours -
there must be a way that works.  Failing that could have one master
copy of the file and then do a quick find, replace and copy operation.

Re. performance personally I would rather leave this choice with the
user.  I think it would not be too difficult to add a little warning
box to the control panel if system memory <= 256MB then put up a
warning "this could make your laptop run slower" - if worse comes to
worse you could just run cat /proc/meminfo using os.system() and
process the response.

I guess I would have to try and formalize an exact deliverable for the
bounty - but certainly I would not require that it is shipped -
anything that let's us do that that we could apply to images would be
fine.  Though I hope that people would let kids outside of Afghanistan
use it ...

Regards,

-Mike

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 04:17:12PM +0800, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> I don't think you need to do any studies about whether kids want to
>> customize their computers.  This has been a constant message from
>> deployments since day 1.  The first thing kids did with the very first
>> XOs fielded was slap stickers all over them to customize them.
>>
>> Unfortunately, kids have no sense of taste or decorum, and so their
>> desire to have a hello kitty home screen (or whatever) is historically
>> countered by NN's desire to be like Apple, all clean and elegant.
>> This was supported by the UX design team, which wants a design which
>> wins awards, not one that is plastered with kids favorite soccer
>> players or whatever.
>>
>> Walter has tried to bridge this divide in the past by presenting it as
>> a teaching opportunity: make one of the first XO lesson how to
>> customize the code to change the XO man in the home screen or change
>> the colors.  This gives them incentive to learn how to hack the code.
>> It's a very interesting compromise, and maybe it's even the right
>> thing.
>>
>> Anyway, I think we should let the kids customize their machines easily
>> -- certainly to change the colors.  But this discussion is an old one.
>
>>  I wonder how it will turn out this time, maybe we've finally moved
>> past some of the old bugbears.
>
> This is exactly the core[one of not many, at least] problem of current
> situation around sugar core development. After forming SL, nothing
> principally was changed, the same vertical organizational system
> was just moved (dunno how it was in OLPC, created otherwise) to another
> conditions.
>
> People in the field need futures, developers are willing to implement
> them.. nothing happens. In my mind core issue is that no one are willing
> to take responsibility because people who might take this responsibility
> are the same developers and that there is always a chance to get "Are
> you have the full picture of needs to make such invasive decision?".
>
> In my mind, solution might be:
>
> * open minded Core Team[1], to create trends in sugar
> * open minded development in Universe[2] projects, who might/might-not
>  follow Core Team trends; some development might fork particular
>  Universe projects (only projects, starting sugar-window-manager, not
>  sugar because there is not way to fork a community)
> * until that, nobody asked themselves, "Am I doing right,
>  implementing/designing/thinking-about this, so invasive, feature?"
>  implementing/designing/thinking-about is the real core (in comparing
>  with [former] Development Team), preventing that means shooting in the
>  foot^W head.
> * move all responsibilities about how product[3] (not sugar as a set of
>  Universe projects) looks to Platform Team [4]. It will accumulate all
>  efforts about facing deployment needs and particular implementations
>  that are part of the product[3].
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Alsroot/Sugar_Architecture#Core_Team
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Alsroot/Sugar_Architecture#Sugar_universe
> [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Alsroot/Sugar_Architecture#Sugar_distribution
> [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Alsroot/Sugar_Architecture#Platform_Team
>
> --
> Aleksey
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>


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