[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2013-05-08

[Simon Schampijer]

On 05/08/2013 03:02 PM, Walter Bender wrote:
> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. Sugar Labs has been given 8 slots for student interns for Google Summer
> of Code [1]. This means we'll be able to cover a lot ground this summer: we
> have some very strong proposals and a great mentoring team. The next step
> is for the mentors and the sugar-devel team to narrow the applicants down
> to a short list. Many thanks to everyone who has lent a hand so far and to
> Google for giving us this opportunity.
>
> 2. The sugar-devel team has been really busy pushing new features for the
> next release and doing a general clean up of the code base. It is
> remarkable the current pace of activity, especially around the efforts to
> make HTML5/Javascript a first-class approach to Sugar activity development.
> You can follow the work on the devel list [2] or by reviewing (and
> submitting) patches on github [3].
>
> 3. I've been trying to contribute to the overall Sugar effort, but I tend
> to get distracted by Turtle Blocks (AKA Turtle Art). When I was visiting
> RIT a few weeks back, I was inspired to enhance the debugging features
> Turtle Blocks. I came up with a simple way to introduce the concept of
> break-points to the code. I had already introduced blocks to "hide" and
> "show" the program as it executes. And through the "rabbit" and "snail"
> buttons, the user can control the speed of program execution. What I did
> was to combine these two concepts. By introducing a "hide" block into your
> code, the code executes at full speed. Introducing a "show" block causes
> the program to run slowly and display the status of all of its "variables"
> as it runs. A subtle change, but what it allows one to do is to surround
> code you want to debug with a "show" and "hide" blocks. Small blocks of
> code can be examined while the larger program runs at full speed. Really
> helpful for debugging complex projects.
>
> 4. I am also working on another new feature, this one at the request of the
> teachers who have been using Butia in Uruguay. The idea is to be able to
> save a stack of blocks for reuse in multiple projects (instances). The way
> to do that currently is to open a project, copy the stack to the clipboard,
> and then paste it into a new project -- too clumsy to be used on a regular
> basis. The new feature allows users to save a stack to a custom palette.
> This palette is loaded with each instance of Turtle, so it means the stacks
> are available as if they were extensions of Turtle itself. It makes it even
> easier for end-user customization.
>
> === In the community ===
>
> 5. We'll be celebrating International Turtle Art Day (Día Mundial de
> TortugArte) in October. Our objectives are to:
> * Promote the use of Turtle Art
> * Share and promote best practices
> * Celebrate projects for children and teachers
> Details on how you can participate will be made available soon.
>
> 6. How embarrassing [4].
>
> === Tech Talk ===
>
> 7. Laura Vargas reports that Hexoquinasa v0.9 (BETA2) has been released [5]
> and is in the hands of the Ministry of Education of Perú, where it will
> undergo testing.
>
> 8. Daniel Narveaz reports that "the initial bits of the HTML activities
> work has landed. It should now be relatively easy to start writing an
> activity."
>
> (1) You'll need the latest Sugar development environment [6].
> (2) Then open a shell and move to the source directory:
>   make shell
>   cd source
> (3) Create an activity based on a template
>   volo create my-activity ./sugar-html-template
> (4) Install the activity for development as usual
>   cd my-activity
>   python setup.py dev
> (5) To interact with the platform you will need to add the sugar-core-html
> library to your activity
>   volo add -f ./sugar-html-core

I guess that should be: "volo add -f ../sugar-html-core/" from with in 
the my-activity directory.

Once you have the activity running you can then use "Ctrl+Shift+i" to 
inspect the code [1].

Great work everyone,
    Simon

[1] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2013-May/042881.html