[Sugar-devel] Planning for Weds - Tux Paint, Conozco Uruguay, Memorize with Speak

[Albert Cahalan]

Caroline Meeks writes:

> the 3rd graders. They are the ones who
> would test out these three activites.
>
> I want to check in on the current status I think it is:
>
> 1. Tux Paint - Waiting for it to save to the Journal
> before we let the kids use it

Last I checked, the Journal interface...

a. required piles of custom D-BUS code (very painful to do)
b. was being changed
c. would make the kid-friendly picture browser impossible
d. would cause performance-sucking data copies
e. wouldn't provide interoperability anyway

I'd better elaborate on that last item. Tux Paint maintains
some metadata for each image. It's normally kept in extra files.
For example, 20081009200559.png uses 20081009200559.dat containing:

chicken
0 0 0
c255 255 255

This stuff is really internal to Tux Paint; it shouldn't be showing
up in some keyword/label/tag search. There is also a thumbnail.

There are some possibly neat and tidy solutions that I hope to
investigate, involving private PNG tags. The typical solution is
to wrap files in a *.zip archive, which I guess Etoys will claim.

Anyway...

Even on desktop Linux, Tux Paint uses a private sandbox.
IMHO, it's not a bad thing that Tux Paint allows kids to find
back their work. I'm really not sure why a kid is expected to
be able to navigate 100 files all named "Tux Paint image" and
all having the exact same icon, especially when all sorts of
other cruft gets mixed in and the scrolling lags **way** behind.
Seriously, how exactly would the Journal be an improvement?