[Sugar-devel] HTML 5 chapters for "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!"

[Lionel Laské]

Hi James,

Nice to hear that you've been inspired by the book and by HTML5 for Sugar.
Hope that we'll be more and more people each day to transform Sugar Web
into a first-class platform.

Of course, there has been lot of progress on this stuff since the book. BTW
most/all progress are about Sugar 0.100 and the book talk of something that
work for Sugar 0.96 and more.
So:
- The content is not at all obsolete and will work for any Sugar version
starting from 0.96,
- It will be very easy to port a Sugar Activity using HTML5 to a true Sugar
Web Activity. So it's not a lost of time for a developer to start with it.
And because Sugar 0.100 is not officially release today, we could say that
we're not late :-)

However, of course, it will be necessary to update the book in following
months. I will try to help here.

@Sai Vineet, there is small documentation regarding Sugar Web Activities
here [1].
Sure it could be improved but it exist.

Probably more a task for GCI than for GSOC.

            Lionel









2014-02-26 18:30 GMT+01:00 James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com>:

> Sai,
>
> I agree with you that the Booki software in FLOSS Manuals isn't all it
> could be. It's caused me a lot of frustration too. The good thing about it
> is that it gives you a way to work in a Wiki where the content isn't
> automatically published to the whole world. The public website is generated
> from the Wiki as static pages. You only publish when the content is ready
> to publish. You can also create PDFs in the sizes needed for book
> publishing, plus EPUBs for e-books (which can be easily converted to Kindle
> books). That is the brilliant thing about it. The page editing lacks a lot.
> It is just as bad today as it was two years ago.
>
> I use Open Office to create my published books other than my two FLOSS
> Manuals. If you don't need to collaborate on the web it works very well.
>
> I'm willing to deal with FM if somebody else creates the content. You can
> paste HTML from other sources into FM if it is simple HTML without styles,
> font tags, etc. I wrote a utility in Python using Beautiful Soup which
> takes the HTML generated by a word processor and strips out the extra junk.
> I use it to create e-books from Open Office documents.
>
> As for a whole book on HTML 5 Activities, that might be a good idea but
> what I had in mind was something on how to take an HTML 5 application and
> put a Sugar Activity wrapper around it that can save and restore with the
> Journal, maybe do some collaboration, etc. In MYOSA I have a chapter on
> PyGame which doesn't actually teach you to use PyGame, but instead shows
> you how to take a PyGame application and put an Activity wrapper around it
> using sugargame. There are other good resources for learning PyGame and
> HTML 5.
>
> It sounds like we may have a Sugar specific HTML 5 library being developed
> and that would be out of scope, other than pointing the reader to
> information about it.
>
> James Simmons
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:56 AM, Sai Vineet <saivineet89 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Yes we need a Web Activity chapter. But a whole book would be probably
>> nicer, since the whole method of development changes in Web Activities. Do
>> we have docs for sugar-web? I haven't found any ... I think we should make
>> a new book on Web Activities.
>>
>> Also I would like to say that editing books on FLOSS manuals is a pain. I
>> tried doing it during GCI, but it didn't work in Chrome, and worked
>> sometimes in Firefox but mostly not. I think that may be the reason for
>> people not contributing much. It would be better if it's shifted somewhere
>> else, maybe something like developer.sugarlabs.org?
>>
>> Regards,
>> Vineet.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:15 PM, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> During the 2012 Google code-in Lionel wrote a nice chapter for MYOSA on
>>> making Activities using HTML 5 and WebKit. I have been slowly and steadily
>>> updating the other chapters in the book to use Sugar 3 and GTK 3. I have
>>> not updated the website with the latest changes because I don't want the
>>> book to be in a half-done state, but I have been making steady progress.
>>>
>>> One thing I have noticed from lurking on this mailing list is that HTML
>>> 5 and Sugar have made a lot of progress since that chapter was written. I
>>> get the impression that what is written there may already be obsolete. I
>>> also feel that I'm not the guy who can fix that. I did a fair amount of
>>> Activity development before writing MYOSA but I've drifted away from it
>>> since then.
>>>
>>> I believe that HTML 5 is going to be a big deal for Sugar and that MYOSA
>>> needs to have some new or updated chapters to reflect that. I am hoping
>>> that some of you might contribute this content.
>>>
>>> As for my own updates, some of them might be published in a couple of
>>> weeks.
>>>
>>
>> Nice!
>>
>>
>>> Working on this book has been a rewarding experience for me. I consider
>>> it part of my own Constructionist education. Since finishing it I have been
>>> involved in writing or publishing many other books. I have transcribed
>>> books for Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Canada. I have scanned a
>>> bunch of books for the Internet Archive, using a scanner I designed and
>>> built myself. I updated a memoir of my days among the Hare Krishnas that
>>> had been on a shelf for 30 years and published it, getting five star
>>> reviews on Amazon. I have formatted for publishing a twelve volume
>>> illustrated English edition of *The Mahabharata*, the great epic of
>>> India. I have written a science fiction novel and am working on a second
>>> one.
>>>
>>> I am not suggesting that contributing HTML 5 chapters to this book will
>>> change your life. However, it definitely changed mine.
>>>
>>> James Simmons
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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