[Sugar-devel] Vision

[Dave Crossland]

Hi!

I'm adding back the <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org> list - I feel annoyed
that the SL lists are currently configured for reply-to-sender-only, but
the systems team rejected my proposal to change this. Does it bother you?
:)

The other question I'm curious to ask you is, would you buy an XO-4 for
your kids if they were available from Sugar Labs or OLPC Inc's websites?

On 19 April 2016 at 22:38, Justin Overton <justin at polymath.ninja> wrote:

> The initial app I have in mind is going to require voice recognition. I'm
> pretty sure I can get it to work Desktop, Android and iOS. I'm not sure if
> I can get it to work via a browser-based solution without using a lot of
> bandwidth because I don't think a browser has the horsepower to do
> recognition offline. I may be wrong.  I'm still on the fence about what to
> target.


The Sugar community has not - as far as I know - begun any efforts to
develop a cross platform version that can sit on top of native APIs for
GNU, Windows, OS X, Android and iOS; the only choices are Sugar (Python +
GTK) and Sugarizer (web.)

Sugar Desktop is Python GTK since Red Hat bankrolled the initial
development; the Sugar community has (mostly?) completed the transition to
GTK3.

But - as far as I know - GTK3 is not yet supporting Android or iOS, and
support for Windows and Cocoa is weak; Red Hat doesn't proactively develop
it, reminding me of Sun's Motif in the late 90s.

This has meant that, in my personal opinion, GTK3 is being widely
abandoned, in favour of Qt or Web. Eg
https://blog.wireshark.org/2013/10/switching-to-qt/ or
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2dxik3/future_of_gnome_and_gtk_when_whole_world_is/

Qt does support all the major platforms today, and it has a VERY nice
Python binding and python tool set from https://www.riverbankcomputing.com

But Qt it isn't really supported in Sugar.

Another Python/GTK alternative is https://github.com/kivy/kivy - popular
for cross platform game development in Python.

So, my guess is that if you don't want to write a web-platform app for
Sugarizer, and you want to write something cross platform, you'll be best
off doing something like what the bittorrent Transmission client does,
where its core is universal C++ and then it has totally native UIs for each
platform - writing a core in Python, a Sugar Activity UI for Sugar, and a
PyQT/Kivy GUI for everywhere else.

Cheers
Dave
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