[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Sugar 0.96 - make it official

[Simon Schampijer]

== Introduction ==
Sugar 0.96 is the new version of the Sugar learning platform. It was 
released the 30th of April 2012 (see [1] 0.96 schedule for details).

The main changes in this cycle was the introduction of the new 
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 which is the sugar-toolkit ported to use GTK+ 3 and 
Pygobject3. Currently Browse, Read, the HellowWorld activity and Abacus 
have been ported to the new toolkit.

Besides moving to the new toolkit Browse and related components have 
been switching to WebKit as its back-end technology.

The full release notes with nice screen-shots can be found at [2].


== What is new for users ==

===Write to Journal anytime===
This Feature has a long history and many thinking has been going into 
this for a few cycles. You can now edit the description of your current 
activity session from within the activity. The main goal is to be able 
to take notes within the activity context while the activity is still 
running. To take notes you can reveal the description palette from a 
button in the activity sub-toolbar, it is the same description field 
that is used in the Journal detail section. You can edit the description 
in both places, as well from within the detail view while the activity 
is still running, the description will be updated accordingly.

The naming alert that prompted the learner for taking notes about the 
activity session when closing the activity has been removed.

Thanks to everyone involved in this great feature, the design team and 
especially to Walter Bender for his constant effort over several release 
cycles to make this happen.

===Global Text to Speech===
The global text to speech feature gives the learner the ability to let 
Sugar speak out any selected text in the user interface. It can be 
accessed by the speech frame device which has the start/pause and stop 
controls. There are options in this palette to adjust the pitch and rate 
as well which are restored over boots. For power users the "alt+shift+s" 
shortcut has been added to control the speak-back.

Thanks to Gonzalo Odiard for bringing this great Feature to us.

===Browse===
Manuel Quiñones did a lot of work on making inline pdf viewing in Browse 
possible using the Evince backend. If the learner clicks on a pdf file 
it will open inside the Browse activity in a new tab. At the bottom of 
the page there are controls to navigate in the pdf, to change the view 
and to save the pdf to the Journal.

===TurtleArt===
Turtle Art advanced from Version 116 to Version 139 over the past 
release cycle. Along with many minor bug fixes:
* Cairo conversion, enabling much improved graphics (anti-aliasing, 
rotating images and text) and an eventual port to GTK-3
* Overhaul of the plugin mechanism and new plugins for Physics, 
Nutrition, Butia, WeDo, NXT, et al.
* Overhaul of the help mechanism to make help more readily available
* New blocks for speak, mouse, and audio
* Improved touch support
Many thanks especially to the Butia team that has done stress-testing of 
the plug-in mechanism and as a result led to many improvements.

===Measure===
Measure underwent a major re-factoring to enable stereo capture of 
analog audio and digital data.


== What's new for developers ==
The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 
0.96 developer platform:

=== Activity Authors guidelines ===
The most important change is that the GTK+ 2 based sugar-toolkit has 
been deprecated. Newly written activities should use sugar-toolkit-gtk3, 
which is based on GTK+ 3 and Pygobject3, now. There will be only bug 
fixes being available in the future for the old toolkit no new features 
will be made available for it and it will probably go away at one point 
completely. Detailed guidelines for porting existing activities can be 
found at [3].

=== Widgets ===
The Keep button has been removed completely from the API later; please 
adjust existing activities accordingly.

=== API ===
In sugar-toolkit-gtk3 API that has been deprecated for several 
development cycles have been removed:

* Remove support for the old deprecated toolbar
** removed deprecated imports from the activity module, use the widgets 
module instead
** removed the ActivityToolbox class
** removed the Stop button from the ActivityToolbar
** removed set_toolbar/get_toolbar API from the window module
*Datastore: remove deprecated API
*ObjectChooser: remove deprecated parameters
** The objectchooser had the 'title', 'flags' and 'buttons' parameters 
deprecated for a long time, remove them now completely. The only 
parameters allowed are now the 'parent' and the 'what_filter'.
* Bundlebuilder: remove deprecated bundle_name argument
* Activity: remove deprecated _shared_activity member
* ActivityBundle: clean from deprecated code
** removed deprecated mime type 'application/vnd.olpc-x-sugar'
** activity.info file: removed deprecated field 'service_name' use 
'bundle_id' instead
** activity.info file: removed deprecated field 'class' use 'exec' instead


== What's new for packagers ==
* the sugar-toolkit-gtk3 repository has been added
* the Browse activity depend webkitgtk3 instead of xulrunner and 
hulahop, the hulahop module has been deprecated


== Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) ==
For the Sucrose 0.96 release, 16 languages are 100% complete (with 
respect to the core Glucose module).

Armenian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Dutch, English 
(United Kingdom), English (US), French, German, Huastec (Tének), Nepali, 
Polish, Portuguese, Sinhala, Spanish, Thai.	

An additional 8 languages are greater than 80% complete.

Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Tamil, Vietnamese.

With some localization done on a total of 86 languages.


== Compatibility ==
Activities that has been ported to sugar-toolkit-gtk3 will not run on 
older Sugar versions where the new toolkit is not available. Which means 
latest Browse and Read will not run on Sugar versions < 0.96. This is 
reflected in the activity providing backend ASLO where the activities 
are marked 0.96 only.


== Getting the sources ==
If you want to package Sugar for your favorite distribution or just want 
to examine Sugar's lovely code here are the released bundles. If you are 
interested in the full changelog you can use the Sugar git repositories.

=== Glucose modules ===
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.96.1.tar.bz2 
sugar 0.96.1]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-datastore/sugar-datastore-0.96.0.tar.bz2 
sugar-datastore 0.96.0]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit/sugar-toolkit-0.96.1.tar.bz2 
sugar-toolkit 0.96.1]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/sugar-toolkit-gtk3-0.96.1.tar.bz2 
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 0.96.1]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-base/sugar-base-0.96.0.tar.bz2 
sugar-base 0.96.0]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-artwork/sugar-artwork-0.96.2.tar.bz2 
sugar-artwork 0.96.2]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-5.0.2403.tar.gz 
etoys 5.0.2403]

=== Fructose modules ===
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Pippy/Pippy-46.tar.bz2 
Pippy 46]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Browse/Browse-137.tar.bz2 
Browse 137]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Calculate/Calculate-40.tar.bz2 
Calculate 40]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Etoys/Etoys-116.tar.gz 
Etoys 116]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Chat/Chat-76.tar.bz2 
Chat 76]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/TurtleArt/TurtleArt-139.tar.bz2 
TurtleArt 139]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Jukebox/Jukebox-23.tar.bz2 
Jukebox 23]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Log/Log-28.tar.bz2 
Log 28]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/ImageViewer/ImageViewer-20.tar.bz2 
ImageViewer 20]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Write/Write-79.tar.bz2 
Write 79]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Terminal/Terminal-36.tar.bz2 
Terminal 36]
* 
[http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Read/Read-99.tar.bz2 
Read 99]


== How to contribute with testing ==
Sugar 0.96 has been released. We are still stabilizing the areas that 
have seen major changes like the new stugar-toolkit-gtk3 the new GTK+ 3 
Sugar theme and the Browse activity that has been ported to use Webkit. 
It is very important to get feedback from and that you report the bugs 
you find. The order of stability depends among other things as well on 
'''you'''.

If you find bugs please report them into the Sugar Labs bug tracker [4] 
indicating the 0.96.x version in the ticket version field. If you have 
hardware from OLPC you can use the 12.1.0 builds [5] for the i686 
architecture (XO 1 and XO 1.5) and the ARM architecture (XO 1.75). Those 
builds include the latest Sugar 0.96.x. Hardware specific bugs 
especially with the new 1.75 hardware please report at the 
[http://dev.laptop.org/ OLPC bug tracker]. The current development 
version is as well available in Fedora 17 [6] and sugar-jhbuild (sugar* 
master branches).


==Credits==
This cycle we want to espacially thank the contributors to the GTK+ 
3/pygobject3 port of the toolkit! All the attendees of the 
Gtk3_Hackfest_2011 in Praha and the Rosario meetup our warmest "thank 
you". Kudos go to the Palette people!

Many people contributed to this release indirectly, including testing, 
documentation, translation, contributing to the Wiki, outreach to 
education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give 
our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this 
Sugar release possible.

We want to especially thank:
* the [[Infrastructure_Team |  ''Infrastructure team'']] which does all 
this great work in the background without which the development would 
not be possible at all,

* the ''deployments'' that provide the development team with feedback 
from the field,

* the [[Design_Team |  ''Design team'']] which guided the design of 
features with UI changes or impact on the workflow,

* the [[Translation_Team |  ''Translation team'']] which makes sure that 
Sugar is enjoyable in the local languages of our users,

* the ''developers'' that submit patches for new features and bug fixes 
and do review other's patches,

* the ''maintainers'' that make sure their code is shippable and which 
provide packagers with new tarballs,

* the ''packagers'' which provide distributions with new Sugar packages,

* the [[Sugar_on_a_Stick | ''SoaS team'']] for providing a Sugar version 
to test with during the development cycle,

* the ''testers'' for finding the small and bigger issues,

* the ''release team'' and [[Development_Team | ''Development team'']] 
for coordinating those efforts.


== Looking forward to 0.98==
In the 0.98 development cycle the porting of the Shell to GTK+ 3 and 
pygobject3 is a major task. Furthermore the remaining bugs in the new 
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 should be fixed. We encourage activity developers to 
port their activity to the new toolkit and GTK+ 3 and pygobject3.


On behalf of the community who made this possible,
    Simon


[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Roadmap#Schedule
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Notes
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3/Porting
[4] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org
[5] http://build.laptop.org/12.1.0
[6] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17