[sugar] Porting apps, which ones?

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

MBurns wrote:
> Is there a OLPC blessed list of what programs would like to be 
> ported/packaged for the laptop? It seems right now that is either core 
> system software, or individual developers scratching their own itch. 
> The wiki doesn't appear to have any specific list.
>
> A small group of us at Oregon State would like to help contribute in 
> building application bundles and the like, but would rather our goals 
> be put toward a real need, rather than something we think would be 
> useful. What applications should we look into working on?
>

Hi,

so, that's a good question... I think porting some GNOME apps to sugar 
would be interesting (someone started to port abiword and evince for 
example).

Though I suggest to take a different approach.

With sugar we are redesigning the user experience top-down, which means 
traditional desktop applications doesn't integrate well. I don't mean we 
should rewrite everything but that it takes some thinking to decide what 
to port and how to make it fit inside the sugar environment. For the 
browser, for example, we aren't taking firefox or epiphany as is, 
instead we are reusing the engine but rewriting the user interface so 
that we can integrate it better with sugar. It's also matter of visual 
integration but not only that. The browser for example has a sharing 
links feature which reuse the mesh infrastructure that sugar is providing.

We need help to work on the sugar shell and to write the core activities 
(reusing code from other applications where it make sense). We don't 
have a TODO for sugar yet but we should have one.

Anyway, if you are interested to help out, we can figure out a start point.

Marco