Archive/Current Events/2013-11-12

Sugar Digest
1. Congratulations and thank you to Daniel Narvaez, the Sugar release manager, and the Sugar developer team on the occasion of the release of Sugar 100. It is by far the best version of Sugar to date and it was developed using the most effective workflow we have yet to embrace as a community.

What is new for users What's new for developers
 * Web Services
 * Multiple Home Views
 * Multiple Selection in the Journal
 * Enable the change of the Home Icon
 * Improved Content Bundle Support
 * Background image in Home View
 * Database Support in 3G Modems control panel
 * Improved Activities Updater
 * Web activities
 * Extending Sugar

Details are available here.

Please contribute to our testing: You can run sugar-build or use one of the images Gonzalo Odiard has prepared for the OLPC XO hardware.

The tentative schedule for Sugar 102 is:

0.101.0 - 12/01/13 0.101.1 - 01/01/14 0.101.2 - 02/01/14 0.101.3 - 03/01/14 - Feature freeze 0.101.4 - 04/01/14 - String, UI, API freeze 0.102.0 - 05/01/14 - Final release

Daniel is soliciting feature requests; please send email to sugar-devel to get the discussion of proposed features started.

2. Sugar Labs has been accepted as one of ten organizations globally to participate in Google Code In. Last year's contest was lots of fun and resulted in lots of tasks completed and some new developers joining our ranks. This year should be fun as well. I've put together a preliminary list of tasks for the contest. We can add more tasks as the contest progresses. (The contest begins on November 18.)

Please, we need more mentors. Please contact me if you have any questions.

I also encourage you to solicit contestants from our user community. Last year, we had great contributions from the Uruguay deployment. I am hoping we are also able to reach other deployments this year.

In the community
3. There will be a Sugar/Turtle Art Day at UWCSEA on November 15.

4. olpc BaseCamp @ Malacca 2013 is being held from November 16 - 18. On the 16th, we'll run a Turtle Art Day in parallel.

Tech Talk
5. In the builds that Gonzalo has been preparing are a number of features we are testing in Australia. We hope to get many of these features accepted upstream in Sugar 102. Among these features are:
 * widgets for age and gender in the About Me section of the control panel
 * a webservice for sending Sugar journal items to the Journal Share activity
 * a webservice for gathering Sugar activity usage statistics
 * some new artwork for mesh views
 * a dbus service used to update favorite activities (used by the Share Favorites activity)
 * configurable limits to the maximum number of open activities
 * configurable limits to the maximum number of instances open for a given activity (e.g., limiting Record to one open instance at a time)

6. Working with Marion Zepf and Alan Aguiar (with some help from Martin Abente), we are close to releasing a version of Turtle Blocks that has Marion's export Python feature. It would be great to work with some one on testing this feature in a middle-school classroom.

Sugar Labs
7. Please visit our planet.