[Sugar-devel] Sugar as a Green Design Pattern (James Cameron)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 06.12.2011, at 20:52, Gary Martin wrote:

> Hi Lionel,
> 
> On 6 Dec 2011, at 13:15, Lionel Laské wrote:
> 
>> 
>>>> In my mind, it is mostly nothing about Sugar [learning environment],
>>>> but about OLPC's efforts of creating XO laptops. Moreover, Sugar
>>>> [learning environment] might be considered as a bad example for Green
>>>> Design Patterns, because is not all time efficient in case of computer's
>>>> resources consumption :).
>>> 
>>> I agree.  I don't see how Sugar could be considered Green.
>> 
>> This last sentence is very disturbing for me :-(
>> 
>> By the way, I've just read an old page on the OLPC Wiki about power
>> management on the XO (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Power_management).
>> Now I understand that what I'm called "Green optimization" don't come from
>> the software (Sugar) but from the hardware/firmware on the XO.
>> So, okay it make sense for me that Sugar is not the key point to talk about
>> Green Pattern.
> 
> I just wanted to agree that, Green Design Patterns (as I understand the term), is something that OLPC have been making the most effective and interesting efforts towards.
> 
> However it is worth noting that – wearing my Sugar Activity hat – Sugar Activities have and continue to need to play their part in the mix as well. There are many activity examples that make specific power usage decisions. To take one case, the Physics Activity is a computationally expensive programme and it takes great care to suspend its simulation processing when the user switches away from the activity view. You can also argue that efforts of the Sugar toolkit/shell developers to keep their eyes on the goals of low memory and low processing requirements has and is critical to the success of keeping resource consumption as low as possible. With my Design Team hat on, I'd love to see us improve the Sugar user experience with much wider use of animation transitions and compositing, but this often has a notable impact on memory and cpu usage, so again we've tried to avoid such system requirements.
> 
> Regards,
> --Gary


Good point. Etoys, too, suspends its animation when it is not the foreground activity. It does not do it on other platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.). That's because Sugar is (to my knowledge) the only desktop system where this behavior is actually expected of the programs. Dedicated Mobile OSes do that too. Just like the keep/resume idea is now commonplace in mobile OSes.

- Bert -