RE: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 13:10 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote: Hi everyone, I'm perfectly willing to do this work but how I can be sure it will actually be used? What do we need to do to get libabiword updated? sugar-jhbuild uses an ancient patched tree dating from November last year. We've released 2.6.4 3 weeks ago with *tons* of bug fixes on that. Afaik, 2.6.4 is on the images What version is actually being shipped with sucrose? What do we need to do to get it updated? Someone should just update jhbuild... i could do that when i find some spare time and motivaten; feel free to beat me to it. I'd just like to know what I need to do to get the required libabiword into the tree so that this feature can be implemented. We'll need to backport the featured to 2.6.x first. Will do that soonish as well. Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 16:47 +0200, J.M. Maurer wrote: What version is actually being shipped with sucrose? What do we need to do to get it updated? Someone should just update jhbuild... i could do that when i find some spare time and motivaten; feel free to beat me to it. Updated jhbuild to abiword 2.6.4. Let's hope we can get the coloring per collaborator in 2.6.5, or at least 2.6.6. Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 22:12 +0200, J.M. Maurer wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 21:37 +1000, Martin Edmund Sevior wrote: Thanks Tomeu and Eben. Yes, we'll need to expand the abiwidget api. I'll look to do this if I can can get sugar-jhbuild to work again. That, or we could just add an 'EditMethod', so we can invoke it using a 'well known' function name. Not sure what the nicest approach is. I'm inclined to expand the api though. Hi everyone, I'm perfectly willing to do this work but how I can be sure it will actually be used? What do we need to do to get libabiword updated? sugar-jhbuild uses an ancient patched tree dating from November last year. We've released 2.6.4 3 weeks ago with *tons* of bug fixes on that. What version is actually being shipped with sucrose? What do we need to do to get it updated? I'd just like to know what I need to do to get the required libabiword into the tree so that this feature can be implemented. Cheers Martin Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
-Original Message- From: Eben Eliason [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thu 7/31/2008 2:29 AM To: Tomeu Vizoso Cc: Martin Edmund Sevior; Walter Bender; OLPC Development; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Chris Ball; Sugar Mailing List Subject: Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:24 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 14:50 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 23:32 -0400, Brian Jordan wrote: The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO. Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic. OK Guys, I get the message :-) I'll look to see how this can be enabled by default in the most UI-easy way possible. OK Guys, Your wish is my command. See: http://msevior.livejournal.com/2008/07/29/ Awesome, anybody would like to expose this functionality in Write? Should be quite easy, but may involve adding API to abiwidget. The original mockups for Write have been waiting for this moment to arrive. For the reference of any who dare to take on the task (The button being clicked is a Highlight text by author button): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Activity_write_view.jpg Thanks Tomeu and Eben. Yes, we'll need to expand the abiwidget api. I'll look to do this if I can can get sugar-jhbuild to work again. BTW for those who recommend we abandon sugar-jhbuild, I definitely disagree. You definitely always want the fastest machine you can get for development work and for all it's problems, sugar-jhbuild gives the best way to get an up to the second snapshot of the development trees everywhere. Of course activities require regular testing on the xo hardware, which is now much more available. After I tried out Write on a B2 back in 2007 I realised that many speedups and optimizations were needed to get decent performance. Martin Sevior Thanks a lot, Tomeu ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 21:37 +1000, Martin Edmund Sevior wrote: Thanks Tomeu and Eben. Yes, we'll need to expand the abiwidget api. I'll look to do this if I can can get sugar-jhbuild to work again. That, or we could just add an 'EditMethod', so we can invoke it using a 'well known' function name. Not sure what the nicest approach is. I'm inclined to expand the api though. Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 14:50 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 23:32 -0400, Brian Jordan wrote: The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO. Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic. OK Guys, I get the message :-) I'll look to see how this can be enabled by default in the most UI-easy way possible. OK Guys, Your wish is my command. See: http://msevior.livejournal.com/2008/07/29/ Awesome, anybody would like to expose this functionality in Write? Should be quite easy, but may involve adding API to abiwidget. Thanks a lot, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:24 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 14:50 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 23:32 -0400, Brian Jordan wrote: The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO. Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic. OK Guys, I get the message :-) I'll look to see how this can be enabled by default in the most UI-easy way possible. OK Guys, Your wish is my command. See: http://msevior.livejournal.com/2008/07/29/ Awesome, anybody would like to expose this functionality in Write? Should be quite easy, but may involve adding API to abiwidget. The original mockups for Write have been waiting for this moment to arrive. For the reference of any who dare to take on the task (The button being clicked is a Highlight text by author button): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Activity_write_view.jpg - Eben Thanks a lot, Tomeu ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 14:50 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 23:32 -0400, Brian Jordan wrote: The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO. Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic. OK Guys, I get the message :-) I'll look to see how this can be enabled by default in the most UI-easy way possible. OK Guys, Your wish is my command. See: http://msevior.livejournal.com/2008/07/29/ Cheers Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 12:11 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I agree that this is a goal that makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, my experience says that the approach you are suggesting won't be less work than what we are doing right now, because the software components you mentioned aren't so easily malleable as you seem to think. Your argument might be correct for Abiword (I haven't look at the code) but are completely off-base for Firefox, which is based on a very sophisticated XUL/Javascript/XML based extensibility framework, with far better developer support than we currently have for Python. Well, with our current model, you can develop extensions in C++, JS and python in the same way you would do it for firefox or any other xulrunner-based app. And you can use those extensions as well in any of those apps if it makes any sense. So I think in this regard we are doing things as you are asking. About using XUL instead of the usual pygtk-based activity stuff, I really cannot see how it would help us. I don't see any advantage but see lots of code that would need to be rewritten. Can you enumerate the advantages you see by moving to use the XUL stuff? I guess you are suggesting to do something similar to Songbird. Thanks, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
For Firefox, that means (for example) that we can use upstreams Awesome Bar instead of reimplementing our own url completion. For abiword, it means acknowledging that a lot of our initial Tubes port was/is simply unnecessary now that we have a stream-based collaboration mechanism, and we can/should be able to strip down Write as a consequence. Iirc, the collaboration code in Write itself is already tiny these days. Or did I miss something spectacular that changes the way collaboration on the XO works? Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 21:41 -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Martin Sevior wrote: | Hi Folks, | Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we | haven't put the UI in to enable it. I would like an additional control for background color. Eben, what do you think? | I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea | though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids | want to do this they can. Have you used Gobby? It's the shared editor that people at OLPC _actually_ use, and having per-user background colors is among its key features. Not sure if I read this correctly, but are you implying that Write's collaboration is not used, but Gobby's is? If so, is there any particular collaboration issue/bug that needs my attention? Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Write needs your help (was Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 10:16 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Bobby Powers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marc is a bit of a perfectionist so I'm not sure how usable 95% of the work is and whether it could be finished by simply using it and providing bug reports as needed would be. Is this something the community could help with? I know myself and maybe another person or two who would be willing to help if it was clear what else needed to be done. There is 1 issue in abiword's layout engine that prevents this from being finished. Martin and I discussed it on IRC, and we might have a way to do it. It needs some more explicit designing before we should implement it though. As for me being a perfectionist: I don't want to allow hacks in the code that fix a particular problem now, but will haunt us in the future :) Martin and Marc will know better about the syntax highlighting stuff, but if you can help with the very important activity that Write is, please consider properly packaging pyabiword for fedora (and other distros): http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList#OLPC_Wishlist We are using a _really_ old prerelease tarball of abiword: 2.6.0.svn20071127 . The Abi guys have already released 2.6.4 :/ I'm working on pushing proper packages in Fedora as we speak. It could take a few days before it's finished as this is all spare time work. AbiSource Corporation employees (read: me) can be hired though *hint* :-) Marc ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 J.M. Maurer wrote: | Have you used Gobby? It's the shared editor that people at OLPC | _actually_ use, and having per-user background colors is among its key | features. | | Not sure if I read this correctly, but are you implying that Write's | collaboration is not used, but Gobby's is? Yes. OLPC developers may have been using Write for collaborative document authoring, but I am not aware of it. I am aware of several occasions on which Gobby has been used for this purpose, for example for preparing minutes for a meeting on IRC. | If so, is there any | particular collaboration issue/bug that needs my attention? Not a bug. There are two issues: 1. To the best of my knowledge, Write's collaboration system does not interoperate with any application that is available on non-Sugar desktops. ~ Thus, in order to make use of Write, all participants must have an XO, emulator, or sugar-jhbuild running. I do not see this as a significant obstacle in a Rwandan elementary school, but in the diverse environments of OLPC volunteers, we cannot assume that everyone has easy access to a Sugar instance. In my view, the ultimate solution to this is to push our Telepathy-based collaboration stack upstream into the standard Linux desktop environments. ~ Until then, we should come up with a streamlined Sugar emulator that makes it easy to run an Activity like Write under any standard Linux desktop. 2. Sugar collaboration over the internet requires a specialized Jabber server. It has proven difficult to set up such a server at all, and impossible to set up a server that can be made public without collapsing under the load. Hopefully, after the Gadget work is complete, we will begin to see reliable public collaboration servers appear. - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkiCZHkACgkQUJT6e6HFtqSjfQCfaoF+5IbBo6aFsRFwX5LV6jOb vmoAoIZ/VhpLCcygbI1eHQa2jjzLo99k =DkVL -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 18:02 -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 J.M. Maurer wrote: | Have you used Gobby? It's the shared editor that people at OLPC | _actually_ use, and having per-user background colors is among its key | features. | | Not sure if I read this correctly, but are you implying that Write's | collaboration is not used, but Gobby's is? Yes. OLPC developers may have been using Write for collaborative document authoring, but I am not aware of it. I am aware of several occasions on which Gobby has been used for this purpose, for example for preparing minutes for a meeting on IRC. But does this hold for kids as well? After all, they are the primary audience for Write. | If so, is there any | particular collaboration issue/bug that needs my attention? Not a bug. There are two issues: 1. To the best of my knowledge, Write's collaboration system does not interoperate with any application that is available on non-Sugar desktops. Well, the AbiCollab plugin existed before Write did, so making Write 'interoperate' with AbiWord would be trivial (in fact, they are exactly the same). ~ Thus, in order to make use of Write, all participants must have an XO, emulator, or sugar-jhbuild running. I do not see this as a significant obstacle in a Rwandan elementary school, but in the diverse environments of OLPC volunteers, we cannot assume that everyone has easy access to a Sugar instance. In my view, the ultimate solution to this is to push our Telepathy-based collaboration stack upstream into the standard Linux desktop environments. ~ Until then, we should come up with a streamlined Sugar emulator that makes it easy to run an Activity like Write under any standard Linux desktop. There is no technical reason at all that Write could not be made to collaborate with normal AbiWord's. Technically, it already works. There is just no UI that currently exposes it. One could for example add a UI that would allow Write to use abicollab.net's service. This way normal AbiWord users could interoperate trivially with Write, on a global scale. This already works *now*, and has been built from the ground up to scale. Millions of users should be no problem at all for the service. What I'm trying to say: Write's collaboration protocol is *exactly* the same as AbiWord's protocol. 2. Sugar collaboration over the internet requires a specialized Jabber server. It has proven difficult to set up such a server at all, and impossible to set up a server that can be made public without collapsing under the load. Hopefully, after the Gadget work is complete, we will begin to see reliable public collaboration servers appear. I've always been of the opinion that using Jabber for this sort of thing was a bad choice. That's why we don't depend on it anymore. Marc - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkiCZHkACgkQUJT6e6HFtqSjfQCfaoF+5IbBo6aFsRFwX5LV6jOb vmoAoIZ/VhpLCcygbI1eHQa2jjzLo99k =DkVL -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
Hello Martin - On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Samuel, Marc Maurer has done 95% of the work required to do multi-programming language syntax highlighting in libabiword. The advantage of using libabiword is that you get collaboration for free. It is easy enough to embed this in your own canvas and hook up the controls you need or want, just as we've done for Write. that sounds great! Marc is a bit of a perfectionist so I'm not sure how usable 95% of the work is and whether it could be finished by simply using it and providing bug reports as needed would be. Is this something the community could help with? I know myself and maybe another person or two who would be willing to help if it was clear what else needed to be done. yours, Bobby Hopefully, Marc will chime in soon. Cheers Martin On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 00:39 -0400, Samuel Klein wrote: There has been talk about expanding Pippy to support a variety of programming languages, perhaps as plugins; to add syntax highlighting; and general interest in seeing Develop proceed. Syntax highlighting in Write has been brought up as well. C and Javascript environments have been specifically highlighted, since C is used for a fair bit of code that we ship; but enthusiasts of Ruby and many other languages have considered providing an intro dev environment as a standalone activity, one per language. And HTML creation is possible in Write but without highlighting, and it is not obvious how to put this to good use. Finally, we now have activities for Etoys (Squeak), Scratch, and Turtle Art, but not yet a Logo activity; though a few people are working on the latter. Where are we with these developments? What plans are there to complete any of the above this year? What specific features should we schedule to support the above, and which is most important? SJ ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Write needs your help (was Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Bobby Powers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marc is a bit of a perfectionist so I'm not sure how usable 95% of the work is and whether it could be finished by simply using it and providing bug reports as needed would be. Is this something the community could help with? I know myself and maybe another person or two who would be willing to help if it was clear what else needed to be done. Martin and Marc will know better about the syntax highlighting stuff, but if you can help with the very important activity that Write is, please consider properly packaging pyabiword for fedora (and other distros): http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList#OLPC_Wishlist We are using a _really_ old prerelease tarball of abiword: 2.6.0.svn20071127 . The Abi guys have already released 2.6.4 :/ The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC. If we cannot bring all the abiword potential to Sugar's Write, we risk someone will start asking for running unsugarized OpenOffice or Abiword on the XO, just as happened with Browse :/ Thanks, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Programming environments on the XO
Hi, There has been talk about expanding Pippy to support a variety of programming languages, perhaps as plugins; to add syntax highlighting; and general interest in seeing Develop proceed. Pippy's always had syntax highlighting, see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Pippy.png The gtksourceview2 library we're using has support for syntax highlighting almost all programming languages, not just Python. If someone has another educationally-appropriate programming language in mind, I think it'd be short work to add support for it into Pippy. Gathering tutorial code for the new language would be harder work. Syntax highlighting in Write has been brought up as well. C and Javascript environments have been specifically highlighted, since C is used for a fair bit of code that we ship; but enthusiasts of Ruby and many other languages have considered providing an intro dev environment as a standalone activity, one per language. And HTML creation is possible in Write but without highlighting, and it is not obvious how to put this to good use. I'd be happy to switch over to embedding a Write buffer into Pippy, once it has syntax highlighting. Another useful feature would be for Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. - Chris. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkh/ZTUACgkQUJT6e6HFtqSdzwCfXnq/N5tEk/jhuBttxx77vauD wtkAnj4JzHOxwswpf/12WKnoPeKA4LBd =FTjC -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:16:07AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: If we cannot bring all the abiword potential to Sugar's Write, we risk someone will start asking for running unsugarized OpenOffice or Abiword on the XO, just as happened with Browse :/ Given the quantity of free software available for Linux distributions relative to the quantity of available sugarized applications, I believe that repeats of this pattern will be inevitable. As I understand, there are a variety of problems with the use of unsugarized applications: - UI issues because of high screen dpi and small size. - Journal integration. - Resource utilization. - Bitfröst and security concerns. - Collaboration. I expect there are others and would be happy to know them so that I better understand this problem. --- By simplifying Journal integration and collaboration, the following steps might improve our ability to support unsugarized apps without sacrificing much in the way of user experience. To simplify Journal/datastore integration: *) Remove the Bitfröst application isolation scheme or modify it such that Activities could write to arbitrary locations in which the olpc user has write permissions. This would allow unsugarized activities to write to places they (as Linux apps) expect to be able to write, such as /home/olpc/ (e.g. for configuration settings and saving user files). *) Make the Journal a watcher and indexer instead of a gatekeeper to the user's data so that applications no longer need to be ported to write data and metadata via the datastore API. We could use inotify(7) to add a watch to the user's home directory. The watching application (Journal) could hold a table of typically used files - Activities / applications. We would still require work to establish which frequently changed files (configuration files, caches) we should be ignoring, and to set default save directories. If a kid writes a file to a very strange place, inotify handlers will allow the journal to keep track of it. Existing code (used for similar indexing applications on Linux desktop systems) could be used to glean file metadata. After modified files are located and metadata gleaned, the Journal would be free to play the same role as it currently does. To provide a fallback, base-level collaboration system: *) Offer a collaboration directory in the user's /home/olpc/, such that simple filesharing can take place. This directory could be managed similarly (reactively to user-driven events) using inotify and a collaboration daemon which manages the broadcast and sharing of files. I'm imagining a network-shared directory such as those found in systems such as NFS, sshfs, samba, etc. --- These are just shiny ideas. I thought I would posit them publicly for eventual comment. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Erik Garrison wrote: | On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:16:07AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: | Given the quantity of free software available for Linux distributions | relative to the quantity of available sugarized applications, I believe | that repeats of this pattern will be inevitable. I am not so sure. Given the tremendous amount of crappy duplicate software, I suspect that we only need to execute a handful of ports to achieve complete functionality. Conversely, there is no good Free video editor for Linux, easy 3D modeler, numerical analysis environment so in many cases, there's simply nothing to port. | As I understand, there are a variety of problems with the use of | unsugarized applications: | | - UI issues because of high screen dpi and small size. | - Journal integration. | - Resource utilization. | - Bitfröst and security concerns. | - Collaboration. | | I expect there are others and would be happy to know them so that I | better understand this problem. The biggest one, much higher on my list than any of the above, is incompatibility with the Activity launching mechanism and window manager. ~ Because of this issue, standard X/Linux applications that have been correctly repackaged as .xo bundles won't even start. It appears that switching to the Freedesktop.org startup notification system and a modified metacity window manager may be able to resolve this. | To simplify Journal/datastore integration: | | *) Remove the Bitfröst application isolation scheme or modify it such | that Activities could write to arbitrary locations in which the olpc | user has write permissions. It is already the case that every activity can write to $HOME, which is currently set equal to $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT/instance/ . This was not always the case, but in any recent build this is not a problem. | *) Make the Journal a watcher and indexer instead of a gatekeeper to | the user's data so that applications no longer need to be ported to | write data and metadata via the datastore API. In my view, the principal reason that this has not been done is that the Journal does not support multiple-file entries. We could tar up all files created into a .tar file, but what is its mime type, and how do you access its contents? Once the datastore supports multi-file entries, it will be trivial to save all created files after each session. | To provide a fallback, base-level collaboration system: | | *) Offer a collaboration directory in the user's /home/olpc/, such that | simple filesharing can take place. I am not sure what you envision here, but I would caution that the difficulty in sharing files is in the low-level network and high-level GUI design. TCP on the mesh has been problematic (#6463), and users cannot be expected to make use of a sharing mechanism that operates only at the command line. - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkh/g/QACgkQUJT6e6HFtqTKVgCgka7WH2Q0AdmOFX4QMCC4eBXT 5pEAoJ3kh0eH8Y0IP6Zul8GYxqsaqFIn =WGf+ -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:16:07AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: If we cannot bring all the abiword potential to Sugar's Write, we risk someone will start asking for running unsugarized OpenOffice or Abiword on the XO, just as happened with Browse :/ Given the quantity of free software available for Linux distributions relative to the quantity of available sugarized applications, I believe that repeats of this pattern will be inevitable. Sorry, I wasn't clear above. I wasn't meaning that running unsugarized apps wasn't a desirable thing, just that I believe that activities like Write and Browse bring important value to our mission and would be a pity if these efforts get lost. As I understand, there are a variety of problems with the use of unsugarized applications: - UI issues because of high screen dpi and small size. - Journal integration. - Resource utilization. - Bitfröst and security concerns. - Collaboration. I expect there are others and would be happy to know them so that I better understand this problem. The one I mentioned above, that we can offer a better experience to our users than the one currently offered by existing desktops and apps. By simplifying Journal integration and collaboration, the following steps might improve our ability to support unsugarized apps without sacrificing much in the way of user experience. To simplify Journal/datastore integration: *) Remove the Bitfröst application isolation scheme or modify it such that Activities could write to arbitrary locations in which the olpc user has write permissions. This would allow unsugarized activities to write to places they (as Linux apps) expect to be able to write, such as /home/olpc/ (e.g. for configuration settings and saving user files). You mean abandoning any of the security goals? *) Make the Journal a watcher and indexer instead of a gatekeeper to the user's data so that applications no longer need to be ported to write data and metadata via the datastore API. We could use inotify(7) to add a watch to the user's home directory. The watching application (Journal) could hold a table of typically used files - Activities / applications. We would still require work to establish which frequently changed files (configuration files, caches) we should be ignoring, and to set default save directories. If a kid writes a file to a very strange place, inotify handlers will allow the journal to keep track of it. Existing code (used for similar indexing applications on Linux desktop systems) could be used to glean file metadata. After modified files are located and metadata gleaned, the Journal would be free to play the same role as it currently does. I would love to move to such an scheme, these are the unsolved (for me) issues: - versioning (solved if we use olpcfs?) - consistency inside entries: most probably we'll need several files to represent a single journal entry. The journal thus would need to know when an entry has been fully written so it can be properly presented in the UI. Not too much ;) To provide a fallback, base-level collaboration system: *) Offer a collaboration directory in the user's /home/olpc/, such that simple filesharing can take place. This directory could be managed similarly (reactively to user-driven events) using inotify and a collaboration daemon which manages the broadcast and sharing of files. I'm imagining a network-shared directory such as those found in systems such as NFS, sshfs, samba, etc. Well, once we can share any entry or object from the journal, would we need something like that? Thanks for bringing this issues again, we surely need to keep banging on them. Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:10 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Erik Garrison wrote: | On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:16:07AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: | Given the quantity of free software available for Linux distributions | relative to the quantity of available sugarized applications, I believe | that repeats of this pattern will be inevitable. I am not so sure. Given the tremendous amount of crappy duplicate software, I suspect that we only need to execute a handful of ports to achieve complete functionality. Conversely, there is no good Free video editor for Linux, easy 3D modeler, numerical analysis environment so in many cases, there's simply nothing to port. | As I understand, there are a variety of problems with the use of | unsugarized applications: | | - UI issues because of high screen dpi and small size. | - Journal integration. | - Resource utilization. | - Bitfröst and security concerns. | - Collaboration. | | I expect there are others and would be happy to know them so that I | better understand this problem. The biggest one, much higher on my list than any of the above, is incompatibility with the Activity launching mechanism and window manager. ~ Because of this issue, standard X/Linux applications that have been correctly repackaged as .xo bundles won't even start. It appears that switching to the Freedesktop.org startup notification system and a modified metacity window manager may be able to resolve this. Could you point me towards such a .xo bundle ? I will love to test it out against a modified metacity based sugar environment. Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
It might be a good longer-term focus to see if we could get some of the Bitfrost ideas pushed upstream rather than diluting them. It has applicability well beyond OLPC and Sugar. -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: These are suggestions with a longterm focus. On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 01:02:04PM -0400, Erik Garrison wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:16:07AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: If we cannot bring all the abiword potential to Sugar's Write, we risk someone will start asking for running unsugarized OpenOffice or Abiword on the XO, just as happened with Browse :/ Given the quantity of free software available for Linux distributions relative to the quantity of available sugarized applications, I believe that repeats of this pattern will be inevitable. As I understand, there are a variety of problems with the use of unsugarized applications: - UI issues because of high screen dpi and small size. - Journal integration. - Resource utilization. - Bitfröst and security concerns. - Collaboration. I expect there are others and would be happy to know them so that I better understand this problem. --- By simplifying Journal integration and collaboration, the following steps might improve our ability to support unsugarized apps without sacrificing much in the way of user experience. To simplify Journal/datastore integration: *) Remove the Bitfröst application isolation scheme or modify it such that Activities could write to arbitrary locations in which the olpc user has write permissions. This would allow unsugarized activities to write to places they (as Linux apps) expect to be able to write, such as /home/olpc/ (e.g. for configuration settings and saving user files). *) Make the Journal a watcher and indexer instead of a gatekeeper to the user's data so that applications no longer need to be ported to write data and metadata via the datastore API. We could use inotify(7) to add a watch to the user's home directory. The watching application (Journal) could hold a table of typically used files - Activities / applications. We would still require work to establish which frequently changed files (configuration files, caches) we should be ignoring, and to set default save directories. If a kid writes a file to a very strange place, inotify handlers will allow the journal to keep track of it. Existing code (used for similar indexing applications on Linux desktop systems) could be used to glean file metadata. After modified files are located and metadata gleaned, the Journal would be free to play the same role as it currently does. To provide a fallback, base-level collaboration system: *) Offer a collaboration directory in the user's /home/olpc/, such that simple filesharing can take place. This directory could be managed similarly (reactively to user-driven events) using inotify and a collaboration daemon which manages the broadcast and sharing of files. I'm imagining a network-shared directory such as those found in systems such as NFS, sshfs, samba, etc. --- These are just shiny ideas. I thought I would posit them publicly for eventual comment. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
Edward Cherlin wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:58 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC. I can do that. OK, Cyrillic works. I just entered every key on the layout, upper and lower case. I'll get you lots more writing systems later today. I am _not_ going to test every Chinese character %-[. Which version are you testing? I would say that downloading an Abiword binary 2.6.4 from abisource.com may be best, as that's the version that I hope we'll use in Write for 8.2.0. I'll see about that. Right now I am using Write 55-0ubuntu1, which doesn't say what version it is in those terms. http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu is out of date. It says 2.4.6 was in Gutsy, and that 2.6 should have been in Hardy, but what I see is Abiword 2.4.6-3ubuntu3. What actually happened? That's not out of date: Ubuntu ships horribly outdated versions of AbiWord. For a recent (2.6 series) build follow those instructions to add the PPA that we maintain. (Yes, if you don't add our repository, the most recent you can get is the same 2.4.6 that they've had for a long time.) -- Ryan Pavlik www.cleardefinition.com #282 + (442) - [X] A programmer started to cuss Because getting to sleep was a fuss As he lay there in bed Looping 'round in his head was: while(!asleep()) sheep++; ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 9:37 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lots of reasonable points made on this thread. The two cents I'd like to throw in are: $0.01: we shouldn't feel like shipping unsugarized apps is a failure: better an working app w/ crappy UI than no working app at all! $0.02: my suggestion to replace Browse wasn't to eliminate the sugar-specific UI work, simply to suggest that we could more profitably base it on Firefox than Gecko. Similarly, minimizing the differences between upstream Abiword and write is (IMO) a Good Thing. We should keep our forks as small as possible, so that we can most effectively use the work being done upstream. For Firefox, that means (for example) that we can use upstreams Awesome Bar instead of reimplementing our own url completion. For abiword, it means acknowledging that a lot of our initial Tubes port was/is simply unnecessary now that we have a stream-based collaboration mechanism, and we can/should be able to strip down Write as a consequence. It's possible that we can most fully utilize Abiword/GTK's theme mechanism to make Sugar UI upstreamable as well. Again, the point is to reduce our diffs with upstream. Yes, I agree that this is a goal that makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, my experience says that the approach you are suggesting won't be less work than what we are doing right now, because the software components you mentioned aren't so easily malleable as you seem to think. Check out the sources for abiword and gnumeric and grep for MAEMO, do you think those projects will let everyone add their ifdefs to suit their UI choices? Checkout microb-engine from maemo, they include their own patched mozilla. This approach might work well for Nokia and their dozens of engineers working on Maemo, but for the Sugar guys? At this time we would be even more insane than we are and we would have provided a much worst experience to kids. Seriously, embedding a gtk widget like the ones we have in Read, Write and Browse gives a pretty sweet spot in customizability. Adding some buttons and calling methods on that widget is not hard, we actually reuse all the hard work in the upstream project while choosing carefully the way in which we expose that functionality to users. If we count the amount of man-hours that went into those activities and told the nokia executives in charge of maemo, I think that they would be quite surprised... And then, having children and activity authors in general being able to read the code and embed those widgets in their python activities... that's invaluable, in my opinion. A maemo-tinkerer would need to set up a build box in order to add a button to the toolbar of one of those apps. Regards, Tomeu (sorry if I have offended anyone regarding Maemo. I know little about it, just have seen how they integrate with upstream projects and wanted to make the point that this wouldn't work for us) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 9:44 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:58 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC. I can do that. OK, Cyrillic works. I just entered every key on the layout, upper and lower case. I'll get you lots more writing systems later today. I am _not_ going to test every Chinese character %-[. Which version are you testing? I would say that downloading an Abiword binary 2.6.4 from abisource.com may be best, as that's the version that I hope we'll use in Write for 8.2.0. I'll see about that. Right now I am using Write 55-0ubuntu1, which doesn't say what version it is in those terms. http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu is out of date. It says 2.4.6 was in Gutsy, and that 2.6 should have been in Hardy, but what I see is Abiword 2.4.6-3ubuntu3. What actually happened? But is the question testing stock Abiword or Write? Or do you want me to do both? Sorry, what I meant is that, ideally, we would be testing Write in joyride with the 2.6.4 version. As we don't have that version in joyride yet, I think the closest we can do is testing Abiword 2.6.4. Regarding language support, I expect it to be the same as Write, but as always, it's better to test what is going to be delivered. Thanks, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I agree that this is a goal that makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, my experience says that the approach you are suggesting won't be less work than what we are doing right now, because the software components you mentioned aren't so easily malleable as you seem to think. Your argument might be correct for Abiword (I haven't look at the code) but are completely off-base for Firefox, which is based on a very sophisticated XUL/Javascript/XML based extensibility framework, with far better developer support than we currently have for Python. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of demand for this from the field? -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkh/ZTUACgkQUJT6e6HFtqSdzwCfXnq/N5tEk/jhuBttxx77vauD wtkAnj4JzHOxwswpf/12WKnoPeKA4LBd =FTjC -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)
On 17 Jul 2008, at 20:37, C. Scott Ananian wrote: $0.01: we shouldn't feel like shipping unsugarized apps is a failure: better an working app w/ crappy UI than no working app at all! Sorry to disagree Scott. I'm not so sure... One 'crappy' UI or weak security riddled activity, leads to a dozen more, and then suddenly no one bothers and it's just a rush to slam in every random feature under the sun – I see a bunch of deviants creeping in and drifting from the Sugar spec already (won't mention names). I understand many hard core developers don't have much interest UI wise, that they think it just visual 'fluff' around their efficient set of classes (I blame badly taught CS classes and different personality types), but UI has a very large impact on user experience, and it is a good chunk of the reason that most *nix desktops have taken __SO__ damn long to get to mainstream (and perhaps why Apple are riding such a good wave just now). As they say, one rotten apple can put you off the rest of the basket. --Gary ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of demand for this from the field? -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. Cheers Martin - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkh/ZTUACgkQUJT6e6HFtqSdzwCfXnq/N5tEk/jhuBttxx77vauD wtkAnj4JzHOxwswpf/12WKnoPeKA4LBd =FTjC -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Martin Sevior wrote: | Hi Folks, | Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we | haven't put the UI in to enable it. I would like an additional control for background color. Eben, what do you think? | I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea | though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids | want to do this they can. Have you used Gobby? It's the shared editor that people at OLPC _actually_ use, and having per-user background colors is among its key features. The colors are stripped for print; clearing the text colors in a Write document is similarly easy. Per-user coloring could work even better in Write, because text has a foreground and background color, and each user also has a foreground color and a background color that appear all over the UI. Those colors are guaranteed to have good contrast against each other, as required in the rest of the UI. Automatically setting the user's text to those settings in a shared Write session would make it instantly obvious who is typing what. I would most prefer a design in which the scheme is black on white by default. When the first user shares the document, the text entry colors are converted to her XO colors, but the existing text is not altered. As each user joins, that person's colors are set to their XO colors, but users may modify their color settings at any time after join+share. It occurs to me that this may work best if colors can be made more sticky, so that anything I type keeps my current colors, not the colors of the text I've selected or am typing into. This is a tricky UI question, which I will leave to the UI folks. Perhaps a sticky checkbox next to the color selectors that checks itself upon sharing? - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkh/9LYACgkQUJT6e6HFtqTiFQCgiwn7n2I5FT253t30YxDAN57M D2wAn0Qaw5gkl/4X/wOsQwYjZ13g/pXw =ovJY -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On 18 Jul 2008, at 02:25, Martin Sevior wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. The codingmonkeys with their great SubEthaEdit also made very good use out of background colour tints to indicate authorship. Works really well: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/images/sessionbig.png As I remember, there is a button to toggle the background colours on and off depending what you want to see (and I think mouse over pop-ups in addition to show the authorship of a text block). Now if I actually had other friends to work with, SubEthaEdit, would have been my editor of choice ;-) --Gary ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of demand for this from the field? -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. Cheers Martin It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking, so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will? -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 02:53 +0100, Gary C Martin wrote: On 18 Jul 2008, at 02:25, Martin Sevior wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. The codingmonkeys with their great SubEthaEdit also made very good use out of background colour tints to indicate authorship. Works really well: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/images/sessionbig.png As I remember, there is a button to toggle the background colours on and off depending what you want to see (and I think mouse over pop-ups in addition to show the authorship of a text block). Now if I actually had other friends to work with, SubEthaEdit, would have been my editor of choice ;-) This is a good idea for coding. We do not do this at present, though we do have different colored carets. Cheers Martin --Gary ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 18:54 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of demand for this from the field? -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. Cheers Martin It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking, so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will? AbiWord has change tracking but my experience with it is that it is more trouble than it's worth. That said, there is a bug in AbiWord-2.6.4 so that if you turn change tracking on all changes in a collaborative document are marked with the same colour. I'd better fix this so that different users get different colours during a collaboration session. Is there some feedback from the field about how kids are finding collaborative writing? Do they use it all? Cheers Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO. Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic. Brian On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 18:54 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of demand for this from the field? -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. Cheers Martin It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking, so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will? AbiWord has change tracking but my experience with it is that it is more trouble than it's worth. That said, there is a bug in AbiWord-2.6.4 so that if you turn change tracking on all changes in a collaborative document are marked with the same colour. I'd better fix this so that different users get different colours during a collaboration session. Is there some feedback from the field about how kids are finding collaborative writing? Do they use it all? Cheers Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 23:32 -0400, Brian Jordan wrote: The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO. Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic. OK Guys, I get the message :-) I'll look to see how this can be enabled by default in the most UI-easy way possible. In the meantime one can fudge this very simply by having each user agree to use their own color for writing text. ie Joe chooses red, Alice choose green, Sarah chooses blue etc. When everyone is happy with the final document choose select-all and change all colours to black. This will work immediately. BTW people might interested in our new service: http://abicollab.net As an easy way to share and collaborate on document creation in a scalable world-wide fashion. With this you can easily setup group documents and work on them in real-time (just like Write does). AbiWord-2.6.4 has the code to connect to this but it is not enabled by default as we're still working on some final bug fixes. You'll have to compile your own version by passing --enable-abicollab --with-abicollab-service-backend to the configure stage when you compile the plugins. Here is my configure line for abiword-plugins (which includes my favourite plugins). ./configure --with-abiword=../abiword-2.6 --prefix=/home/msevior/abidir --disable-all --enable-abicollab --with-abicollab-service-backend --enable-abimathview --enable-abicommand --enable-loadbindings --enable-presentation --enable-OpenDocument Cheers, Martin Brian On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 18:54 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of demand for this from the field? -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: | Another useful feature would be for | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does. | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on. See also #7447. Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all. Hi Folks, Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write. I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea though. The document will quickly become a mess. Though if the kids want to do this they can. Cheers Martin It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking, so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will? AbiWord has change tracking but my experience with it is that it is more trouble than it's worth. That said, there is a bug in AbiWord-2.6.4 so that if you turn change tracking on all changes in a collaborative document are marked with the same colour. I'd better fix this so that different users get different colours during a collaboration session. Is there some feedback from the field about how kids are finding collaborative writing? Do they use it all? Cheers Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Programming environments on the XO
There has been talk about expanding Pippy to support a variety of programming languages, perhaps as plugins; to add syntax highlighting; and general interest in seeing Develop proceed. Syntax highlighting in Write has been brought up as well. C and Javascript environments have been specifically highlighted, since C is used for a fair bit of code that we ship; but enthusiasts of Ruby and many other languages have considered providing an intro dev environment as a standalone activity, one per language. And HTML creation is possible in Write but without highlighting, and it is not obvious how to put this to good use. Finally, we now have activities for Etoys (Squeak), Scratch, and Turtle Art, but not yet a Logo activity; though a few people are working on the latter. Where are we with these developments? What plans are there to complete any of the above this year? What specific features should we schedule to support the above, and which is most important? SJ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO
Hi Samuel, Marc Maurer has done 95% of the work required to do multi-programming language syntax highlighting in libabiword. The advantage of using libabiword is that you get collaboration for free. It is easy enough to embed this in your own canvas and hook up the controls you need or want, just as we've done for Write. Marc is a bit of a perfectionist so I'm not sure how usable 95% of the work is and whether it could be finished by simply using it and providing bug reports as needed would be. Hopefully, Marc will chime in soon. Cheers Martin On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 00:39 -0400, Samuel Klein wrote: There has been talk about expanding Pippy to support a variety of programming languages, perhaps as plugins; to add syntax highlighting; and general interest in seeing Develop proceed. Syntax highlighting in Write has been brought up as well. C and Javascript environments have been specifically highlighted, since C is used for a fair bit of code that we ship; but enthusiasts of Ruby and many other languages have considered providing an intro dev environment as a standalone activity, one per language. And HTML creation is possible in Write but without highlighting, and it is not obvious how to put this to good use. Finally, we now have activities for Etoys (Squeak), Scratch, and Turtle Art, but not yet a Logo activity; though a few people are working on the latter. Where are we with these developments? What plans are there to complete any of the above this year? What specific features should we schedule to support the above, and which is most important? SJ ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
