[Sugar-devel] Gears and random thoughts

[Manuel Quiñones]

Hello,

I've made an activity out of gearsket.ch .  This is a present for our
friend Paul Fox, who pointed me to that excellent app.  Thanks Paul!

http://manuq.github.io/gears-activity/

I contacted the developer and started sending pull-requests to make
GearSketch a lib we could use, and I've been also improving the icons.

It works great in a touchable device.  For touch support it uses
hammer.js .  So this is another option to handle for globally adding
touch in sugar-web.  In previous email I've mentioned pointer.js,
which abstracts input events (mouse, touchscreen, pen tablet) like
latest IE does.

The help inside the app is great.  It brings a demo mode, which
directly shows you what can be done.  It is similar to the one found
in Implode activity.  I wish we can do that as a global solution for
help in web activities.

It is written in coffeescript, and after playing for a bit, I can see
it as a possible choice for activity developers.  Its syntax sugar
makes the code look more like the gtk activities written in python.

One of the reasons we went for plain js for sugar-web was because of
the View Source feature.  Well, seems that since I researched a few
months ago, Source Maps has improved a lot, and I can see coffee code
in the web inspector. If the code breaks or if I add a breakpoint, for
example.  Nice!  Also, GitHub does a nice job displaying only the
coffee changes, and hidding the JS changes by default:

https://github.com/frankleenaars/gearsketch/pull/6/files

Cheers,

-- 
.. manuq ..