Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Seth Woodworth wrote: snip The point of having the Help activity as its own icon was to put it as close and easy to the user as possible. There was a goal of having the help activity or similar introduction run on first boot, but we ran out of time in the 8.2 release. Thank you for bringing this in, Seth. I've been asking a while for at least a first boot - better an opt-out always-after-boot for Help, just like win 95 on As is now, an inconspicuous icon among many, low usability score. BTW, I would want to see a simple way to bind an activity to boot, Help is not the only candidate for that treatment, other options would range from some infomercial, part of G1G1, and local choices. Yama ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 5:11 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@isforinsects.com wrote: I can't answer all or even most of your questions, but they are the right ones to be asking. Your order of solving the issues makes sense for a plan to go into place, but I think they are orthogonal issues, and will be solved by completely different groups. 1. How can we enable writers to easily change the Help Content, bring it up to date and customize it for the XO and for Sugar on a Stick. If by writers you mean the Sugar community, I'm willing to help document and streamline things considerably. If you're trying to solve the issue for X deployment or user, I think that it's a bit harder, but mostly the same issue. Actually I mean the logistics. How can we set this up so multiple authors can work on it and people without technical skills can contribute. Yet at the same time its not a big deal to package it up and put it into a ? Activity and load it onto the activities portal. Seth, if you could set up those technical logistics I think that would be a big help. Currently, the colaboratative writing happens using the floss manuals toolkit at http://en.flossmanuals.net/write . From there, It seems to make a good deal of sense to import the information into a format usable by gnome help. While not perfect, gnome help is proven and usable. david 2. Who will bring it up to date and customize it? It is mostly up to date for .82, it's just not complete. It doesn't cover a lot of the activities yet, nor hardly any support issues. The decision needs to be made if the current revision of the text is frozen as far as .82/8.2.0 is concerned or if it will be improved independently of text for .84 and SoaS. It will be improved independently for at least SoaS. One nice thing about becoming an activity on the activity portal is that it should be easy to update independently of the schedule of larger Sugar releases. Pauline, a Solution Grove writer is working on a SoaS specific update now. So we can get new content in there if we had the technical logistics worked out. 3. How can it be localized effectively? I think that Localization should be happening inside of FlossManuals' toolset. It us up to us to let people/deployments know this, and encourage them. 4. Who will enable different versions to go into different releases? That is entirely up to those who are making releases. nubae GentooEdubuntu, ?? SaoS, and me for OLPC. 5. How will people find the Help content, a ? in the activity ring and/or from Browse. While I live in the browser, chidren, esp those who do not have internet, may not. Technical implementation aside, I feel it should be in both locations; Browse/Library and in the Activity ring. Neither is ideal. P.S. I *still* owe and will work on documenting. -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Seth Woodworth wrote: If not for Rainbow I think that the help activity and the browser could access the same material. ?? I can visit file:///home/olpc/Activities/Help.activity/help/XO_Introduction.html fine in Browse in 8.2.1. (Does having a developer key affect Rainbow file access restrictions?) On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Yama Ploskonka y...@netoso.com responded: snip The point of having the Help activity as its own icon was to put it as close and easy to the user as possible. ... As is now, an inconspicuous icon among many, low usability score. I think a prominent help icon and Need help? text on Browse's start page would be far more discoverable than a (?) among many, but I live in the browser. The OLPC 8.2.1 start page is http://dev.laptop.org/git/library/library-activity/tree/library-common/layout.tmpl Code rebuilds the nifty expanding Library of local content whenever you install content, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Library , this could also detect installation of local help. The SugarLabs start page is http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/browse/repos/mainline/blobs/master/data/index.html Sugar distributions lack the expanding Library (SL ticket 574) but maybe that's moot if http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Library comes to fruition. You can determine in JavaScript if there's a local help manual in the file system or not and create a link to it accordingly; seems-to-work code is at http://www.skierpage.com/olpc/show_help.html Seth: I really really really owe the Sugar community a long email documenting what the heck went on with the Help activity last year http://wiki.laptop.org/go/FLOSSManuals has a section ready and waiting ;-) Cheers, -- =S Page ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Hi, I see a few issues that pretty much need to be solved in order. 1. How can we enable writers to easily change the Help Content, bring it up to date and customize it for the XO and for Sugar on a Stick. 2. Who will bring it up to date and customize it? 3. How can it be localized effectively? 4. Who will enable different versions to go into different releases? 5. How will people find the Help content, a ? in the activity ring and/or from Browse. Its easy to discuss #5 bur really until we solve the ones above it it hardly matters. So how can I help cause issue 1 to be solved? Thanks, Caroline On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 6:44 AM, S Page skierp...@gmail.com wrote: Seth Woodworth wrote: If not for Rainbow I think that the help activity and the browser could access the same material. ?? I can visit file:///home/olpc/Activities/Help.activity/help/XO_Introduction.html fine in Browse in 8.2.1. (Does having a developer key affect Rainbow file access restrictions?) On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Yama Ploskonka y...@netoso.com responded: snip The point of having the Help activity as its own icon was to put it as close and easy to the user as possible. ... As is now, an inconspicuous icon among many, low usability score. I think a prominent help icon and Need help? text on Browse's start page would be far more discoverable than a (?) among many, but I live in the browser. The OLPC 8.2.1 start page is http://dev.laptop.org/git/library/library-activity/tree/library-common/layout.tmpl Code rebuilds the nifty expanding Library of local content whenever you install content, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Library , this could also detect installation of local help. The SugarLabs start page is http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/browse/repos/mainline/blobs/master/data/index.html Sugar distributions lack the expanding Library (SL ticket 574) but maybe that's moot if http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Library comes to fruition. You can determine in JavaScript if there's a local help manual in the file system or not and create a link to it accordingly; seems-to-work code is at http://www.skierpage.com/olpc/show_help.html Seth: I really really really owe the Sugar community a long email documenting what the heck went on with the Help activity last year http://wiki.laptop.org/go/FLOSSManuals has a section ready and waiting ;-) Cheers, -- =S Page -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Hi, I see a few issues that pretty much need to be solved in order. How can we enable writers to easily change the Help Content, bring it up to date and customize it for the XO and for Sugar on a Stick. Who will bring it up to date and customize it? How can it be localized effectively? Who will enable different versions to go into different releases? How will people find the Help content, a ? in the activity ring and/or from Browse. Its easy to discuss #5 bur really until we solve the ones above it it hardly matters. So how can I help cause issue 1 to be solved? Throwing somewhat random ideas, http://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/Publican/ and http://socghop.appspot.com/student_project/show/google/gsoc2009/redhat/t124024692194 may be relevant for what we need. Conditional tagging in Publican may be very useful: http://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/Publican/conditionaltagging.html Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
I can't answer all or even most of your questions, but they are the right ones to be asking. Your order of solving the issues makes sense for a plan to go into place, but I think they are orthogonal issues, and will be solved by completely different groups. 1. How can we enable writers to easily change the Help Content, bring it up to date and customize it for the XO and for Sugar on a Stick. If by writers you mean the Sugar community, I'm willing to help document and streamline things considerably. If you're trying to solve the issue for X deployment or user, I think that it's a bit harder, but mostly the same issue. 2. Who will bring it up to date and customize it? It is mostly up to date for .82, it's just not complete. It doesn't cover a lot of the activities yet, nor hardly any support issues. The decision needs to be made if the current revision of the text is frozen as far as .82/8.2.0 is concerned or if it will be improved independently of text for .84 and SoaS. 1. 3. How can it be localized effectively? I think that Localization should be happening inside of FlossManuals' toolset. It us up to us to let people/deployments know this, and encourage them. 4. Who will enable different versions to go into different releases? That is entirely up to those who are making releases. nubae GentooEdubuntu, ?? SaoS, and me for OLPC. 5. How will people find the Help content, a ? in the activity ring and/or from Browse. While I live in the browser, chidren, esp those who do not have internet, may not. Technical implementation aside, I feel it should be in both locations; Browse/Library and in the Activity ring. Neither is ideal. P.S. I *still* owe and will work on documenting. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Surely an HTML manual in a browser is the way to go.. Perhaps you are correct. If not for Rainbow I think that the help activity and the browser could access the same material. The current OLPC help activity starts a hulahop.webview that displays 'help/XO_Introduction.html' The benefit is it is a single-purpose activity with its own '(?)' icon in the Home view, and it lacks some browser chrome such as the location field and View menu. But those features become a confusing hindrance the moment you follow a link from Help to an external web site. There aren't supposed to be external links in the help manual. It was meant to be a stand-alone manual, suitable for printing or for static html. Perhaps it would be better just to put a link to the local help files on the Browse home page This happened with the early 65x releases of Sugar back in 07 and not very many people ever found the manual. The point of having the Help activity as its own icon was to put it as close and easy to the user as possible. There was a goal of having the help activity or similar introduction run on first boot, but we ran out of time in the 8.2 release. I really really really owe the Sugar community a long email documenting what the heck went on with the Help activity last year. I've done a very poor job relinquishing ownership of the project and passing on information, as I haven't had time to work on the manual since last September. I apologize guys. This is still a bad time for me to get heavily involved in the FlossManual / Help-Activity project, but I should corral the 4+ email threads of questions I have in my to-do folder and write some documentation. (Feel free to poke me about if you see me over the weekend) --Seth ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 12:49 AM, S Page skierp...@gmail.com wrote: Summary: There seems to already be Sugar 0.84 content translated into various languages on flossmanuals.net that someone could remix as HTML and link to from the Browse activity's home page. On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:41 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: We talked a bit about the Help Activity in Paris. I've taken our discussion and written it up here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Help I'm confused, is this related to the current OLPC Help (activity) in OLPC release 8.2 which is hosted at git.sugarlabs.org, or a new activity? For a little background. Last fall, the Sugar manual, at Floss Manuals, was written and bundled as the OLPC help activity very quickly. The fact that it progress as quickly as it did was due to the work of a few people; Walter as a content writer, Anne Gentle as the document maintainer, and Seth and Brian who rolled the manual into the help activity. Long story short - Help was thrown together at the last minute. That page says I think it should be a blurb about being a community project, invitation to ask a question and a link to the manual in a reader. All that information belongs on the Browse home page! The Goals listed for the Help activity seem like the goals for a Sugar home page. Just have a Getting help section of the home page. A manual in a reader? Surely an HTML manual in a browser is the way to go.. Please take a look and edit this spec and start to think about how it should be implemented. I don't understand Help as an activity, Help is useful info organized in HTML pages. At the time OLPC was bound by tighter constraints than Sugar Labs is. The current OLPC help activity starts a hulahop.webview that displays 'help/XO_Introduction.html' The benefit is it is a single-purpose activity with its own '(?)' icon in the Home view, and it lacks some browser chrome such as the location field and View menu. But those features become a confusing hindrance the moment you follow a link from Help to an external web site. Perhaps it would be better just to put a link to the local help files on the Browse home page as I suggest above, and/or provide a Journal entry for the local help content, especially when and if Browse gets multiple tabs. If the distinction between activities and library content goes away then there's even less reason for a standalone help activity. If you have a connection to the net, you should probably just go to the latest up-to-date online help for your software, e.g. http://www.laptop.org/manual or http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar/8_4/TheJournal On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: If translating equates to translating the flossmanuals I think it's worth anyway, whether these pages goes into the Help activity or not. The Flossmanuals.net site seems currently available in English, nl (Dutch), and fa (Persian), but it can host translations in other languages, see http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/TranslatingAManual . I just realized that parts of the Sugar manual have been translated, e.g. http://translate.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar_es/WhatIsAnActivity !! Idea: why not have a mediawiki_syntax2sugar_display converter? Then we could create a Help activity based on content from the Sugar wiki. Or a Tutorials activity based on all tutorials from the wiki. Or others WikiBrowse activities based on other slices of the WikiPedia. Surely by sugar display you just mean HTML? In which case there are lots of tools to turn MediaWiki into HTML, several of which have been used for OLPC content and activities. Check out http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikislices http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikibooks http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer Note that the FlossManuals site uses TWiki, not MediaWiki. There are pros and cons to this. It seems incredibly simple to use http://en.flossmanuals.net/remix to export as HTML; I assume that's how someone created the current OLPC Help activity and online manual and PDF. But the division between the documentation and the wiki is unfortunate, and could be avoided if say wiki.sugarlabs.org had a Category:Sugar_help that people carefully maintain and occasionally turn into a Help manual using MediaWiki tools. flossmanuals is a site that uses a specific methodology and toolkit to crank out manuals in one week sprints. If we want to avoid reinventing the wheel we need to determine how to effectily use the FM output. FM has a decent translation toolkit at http://translate.flossmanuals.net/write . MediaWiki's history and [Compare selected revisions] can help dedicated bilingual translators keep a translation in sync with updates to a master page. E.g. click on the cambios link in the translation header of http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Participate/lang-es
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Hi, We talked a bit about the Help Activity in Paris. I've taken our discussion and written it up here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Help Please take a look and edit this spec and start to think about how it should be implemented. It may not be worth translating it before it is rewritten. Also, I'm not sure what is in the current help activity as it does not run on SoaS. Thanks, Caroline On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.comwrote: Hi Diogo, 2009/5/14 Diogo Serra @ IPLEIRIA diogo.se...@ipleiria.pt: Hy there, Where i can find the *.po of Help activity ? To my knowledge, there is no *.po for the Help activity (but the user Pootle is a committer in git.sugarlabs.org so I'm not 100% sure...) The help activity is a collection of *.html page remixed from the flossmanuals.com website: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ These pages are packaged in a .xo activity. Maybe Seth can tell us more on how to build a Help activity? How did you export the flossmanuals pages to html? Raw scrapping? HTH, -- Bastien ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Hi Caroline, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com writes: We talked a bit about the Help Activity in Paris. I've taken our discussion and written it up here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Help Please take a look and edit this spec and start to think about how it should be implemented. Thanks. It may not be worth translating it before it is rewritten. If translating equates to translating the flossmanuals I think it's worth anyway, whether these pages goes into the Help activity or not. Idea: why not have a mediawiki_syntax2sugar_display converter? Then we could create a Help activity based on content from the Sugar wiki. Or a Tutorials activity based on all tutorials from the wiki. Or others WikiBrowse activities based on other slices of the WikiPedia. Thanks, -- Bastien ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Summary: There seems to already be Sugar 0.84 content translated into various languages on flossmanuals.net that someone could remix as HTML and link to from the Browse activity's home page. On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:41 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: We talked a bit about the Help Activity in Paris. I've taken our discussion and written it up here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Help I'm confused, is this related to the current OLPC Help (activity) in OLPC release 8.2 which is hosted at git.sugarlabs.org, or a new activity? That page says I think it should be a blurb about being a community project, invitation to ask a question and a link to the manual in a reader. All that information belongs on the Browse home page! The Goals listed for the Help activity seem like the goals for a Sugar home page. Just have a Getting help section of the home page. A manual in a reader? Surely an HTML manual in a browser is the way to go.. Please take a look and edit this spec and start to think about how it should be implemented. I don't understand Help as an activity, Help is useful info organized in HTML pages. The current OLPC help activity starts a hulahop.webview that displays 'help/XO_Introduction.html' The benefit is it is a single-purpose activity with its own '(?)' icon in the Home view, and it lacks some browser chrome such as the location field and View menu. But those features become a confusing hindrance the moment you follow a link from Help to an external web site. Perhaps it would be better just to put a link to the local help files on the Browse home page as I suggest above, and/or provide a Journal entry for the local help content, especially when and if Browse gets multiple tabs. If the distinction between activities and library content goes away then there's even less reason for a standalone help activity. If you have a connection to the net, you should probably just go to the latest up-to-date online help for your software, e.g. http://www.laptop.org/manual or http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar/8_4/TheJournal On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: If translating equates to translating the flossmanuals I think it's worth anyway, whether these pages goes into the Help activity or not. The Flossmanuals.net site seems currently available in English, nl (Dutch), and fa (Persian), but it can host translations in other languages, see http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/TranslatingAManual . I just realized that parts of the Sugar manual have been translated, e.g. http://translate.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar_es/WhatIsAnActivity !! Idea: why not have a mediawiki_syntax2sugar_display converter? Then we could create a Help activity based on content from the Sugar wiki. Or a Tutorials activity based on all tutorials from the wiki. Or others WikiBrowse activities based on other slices of the WikiPedia. Surely by sugar display you just mean HTML? In which case there are lots of tools to turn MediaWiki into HTML, several of which have been used for OLPC content and activities. Check out http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikislices http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikibooks http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer Note that the FlossManuals site uses TWiki, not MediaWiki. There are pros and cons to this. It seems incredibly simple to use http://en.flossmanuals.net/remix to export as HTML; I assume that's how someone created the current OLPC Help activity and online manual and PDF. But the division between the documentation and the wiki is unfortunate, and could be avoided if say wiki.sugarlabs.org had a Category:Sugar_help that people carefully maintain and occasionally turn into a Help manual using MediaWiki tools. MediaWiki's history and [Compare selected revisions] can help dedicated bilingual translators keep a translation in sync with updates to a master page. E.g. click on the cambios link in the translation header of http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Participate/lang-es . I don't know if FlossManuals/TWiki has advanced template support to do something similar. People are already working on Sugar/8_4 (sic) files on flossmanuals, there was discussion of a Sugar 0.84 manual in http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2009-March/thread.html http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_help points users to http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar , but I believe this is for Sugar 0.82. (A while ago I complained that version info is not available in flossmanuals along with many other presentation and style problems.) Maybe someone can periodically create a Remix of the current state of these 8_4 chapters and turn it into library content, an activity (maybe create a Sugar_8_4 branch of the existing http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/help ), and/or upload it to a directory on sugarlabs.org. Maybe someone already has; people seem to be working on stuff that isn't noted on the obvious wiki
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
Hi Diogo, 2009/5/14 Diogo Serra @ IPLEIRIA diogo.se...@ipleiria.pt: Hy there, Where i can find the *.po of Help activity ? To my knowledge, there is no *.po for the Help activity (but the user Pootle is a committer in git.sugarlabs.org so I'm not 100% sure...) The help activity is a collection of *.html page remixed from the flossmanuals.com website: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ These pages are packaged in a .xo activity. Maybe Seth can tell us more on how to build a Help activity? How did you export the flossmanuals pages to html? Raw scrapping? HTH, -- Bastien ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity
[forwarding to sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org] 2009/5/14 Diogo Serra @ IPLEIRIA diogo.se...@ipleiria.pt: Hy there, Where i can find the *.po of Help activity ? Thanks -- Diogo Serra Programação e Desenvolvimento Campus 5 - Rua das Olhalvas 2414 - 016 Leiria - PORTUGAL Tel.: (+351) 244 845 052 | Fax: (+351) 244 845 059 | diogo.se...@ipleiria.pt | http://ued.ipleiria.pt ___ Localization mailing list localizat...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
