[Sugar-devel] wordgroupz ( A vocabulary building app) ported to sugar

Gary Martin garycmartin at googlemail.com
Wed Sep 29 10:45:01 EDT 2010


On 26 Sep 2010, at 08:36, Ratnadeep Debnath wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Lexicology is the word that means studying words. It includes
> collecting words, classifying them, researching, learning how to spell
> it, etc. wordGroupz helps one do such things.
> 
> I was thinking of activity names for wordGroupz and I came up with the
> following:
> 1) Learn Vocabulary
> 2) Learn words
> 3) Collect words ( but wordgroupz is more than collecting words)

As the feedback was that the name wordGroupz was a misspelling and non-verb like, I guess "Group Words" could be an obvious choice to keep it close to the original version (I didn't realise this was a port of an existing GNOME application).

However to be honest, I think the extra dependancies are the real issue just at the moment (I haven't seen it working yet). I guess specific distros could each individually package up and install the needed dependancies (though that is not very child friendly, at least a deployment could choose to include it). Unfortunately as it is, almost none of the existing Sugar users will be able to use this activity. I try to keep a fairly clean Sugar environment here for testing, and it fails right away with "ImportError: No module named nltk.corpus"

I made it as far as yum installing 15Mb for python-nltk (which pulled in about 11 external dependancies), at which point the activity would run and show its UI, but was still non-functional. I looked through the error logs (attached below if you are curious) but didn't have time to try and go through the dependencies trying to find what was still missing. 

Using Sugar, I also needed to use curl from a terminal to download the .xo, as the server it's currently hosted on does not provide the correct mime type (Browse just displays the raw data so it's not easy to get it installed). And then to install I used sugar-install-bundle <file.xo> from the terminal

The activity icon also shows up blank and un-clickable in the main Sugar UI with the only way to run it from the Sugar Home list view. Had a quick look and there are two issues here. 1). The activity.info names the icon as:

icon = wordgroupz.svg

... it should be just:

icon = wordgroupz

The icon at this point will still be blank, but is at least clickable in the Sugar UI.

2) The actual wordgroupz.svg is an empty inkscape template that happens to have an absolute (and incorrect) link to an external png file in the place it was on your original build machine. The icon needs to be a svg vector image as it will be scaled and automatically coloured as needed for various parts of the Sugar UI:

	http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac/Making_Icons
	http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface/Icons

On a general note, rather than trying to make an .xo bundle out of all this (bundles should be self contained with all needed resources/dependancies inside), I think your best bet is to try and get it packaged somehow for distros, or perhaps speak with alsroot about his 0install work.

Regards,
--Gary

> Thanks,
> Regards,
> rtnpro
> 
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Gary Martin
> <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Sankarshan,
>> 
>> On 23 Sep 2010, at 14:36, sankarshan wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Tim McNamara
>>> <paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Well done on your release! My *personal* feeling is that you should change
>>>> the name of the Activity. Ideally, all Sugar Activities should be verbs.[1]
>>>> I know that many Activities haven't followed the HIG guidelines, but
>>>> following them demonstrates a level of care. At the very least, I'm not
>>>> happy with the trailing Z. I don't think encouraging misspelling is entirely
>>>> suitable for an educational environment.
>>> 
>>> Is there a way to request feedback on names that are along the lines
>>> mandated by the HIG ?
>> 
>> Sure, if in doubt, post some names you'd consider here. FWIW, it can be tough finding a single verb that makes much sense (and can be quite a pain to change a name later on so is good to settle on a name early as possible).
>> 
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>> 
>>> --
>>> sankarshan mukhopadhyay
>>> <http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>> 
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