Archive/Current Events/2012-07-05
Sugar Digest
1. The last few weeks, I have been working with Cynthia Solomon, one of the inventors of Logo, who has been giving me great feedback on Turtle Art. She has mostly focused on Turtle Art Mini [1] (the version that most closely parallels Brian Silverman's Turtle Art project). At her suggestion, I have enhanced the named action block and named box block: when you create a named stack, a new block appears on the palette for that action; similarly, when you name a box, a new block appears on the palette for accessing that block. I really like the simplicity with which this enables one to extend the block library of Turtle Art.
2. At the urging of Manuel Kaufmann I added a long-overdue feature to the Measure Activity: the ability to tune instruments. Guzman Trindad, a teacher in Uruguay, has been giving me feedback in this development. I think we have a pretty decent tool in Version 41 [2]. It lets you select a note by name or frequency or instrument and displays a tuning line on the frequency-base scale. It also provides a read out of whether or not you are flat, sharp, or in tune. More details are available on the Measure Activity home page.
3. I had a nice meeting with Teemu Leinonen from Alto University last week. Teemu was in town for a conference, where he was presenting his work on TeamUp [3], a really nice classroom collaboration project. It is a web based tool for recording the progress of teams working on group projects. I was inspired to write a new activity to enable groups of learners to pool their efforts and record shared audio notes. Think of it as Portfolio shared among multiple users. While still a work in progress: I hope to have a preliminary release later in the week.
4. Daniel Drake has announced the first release candidate of the new 12.1.0 software release for the XO. It features Sugar 0.96 running on Fedora 17. Details can be found on wiki.laptop.org [4]. Quick links for download are:
5. Daniel Francis, a youth from Uruguay, has joined Developer Team meetings and will be mentored by Sascha Silbe in reviewing patches to Sugar itself. A nice example for other aspiring contributors.
6. Chris Leonard and Simon Schampijer report that Glucose 9.96 branches have been created in Gitorious and matched on Pootle for the beginning of the 0.97>0.98 cycle.
7. Irma Alvarez and Edgar Quispe continue to make progress on Quechua and Aymara. Meanwhile, there seems to be renewed interest in Maori. Please contact Chris if you have interest in contributing to these (or any other of our language projects).
8. Sugar Labs is funding Manuel Quiñones airfare to GUADEC for a GTK3 hackfest with Simon Schampijer and Carlos Garnacho. OLPC is picking up his other expenses. We anticipate good synergy between the Sugar team and the GNOME 3 community and a boost to our efforts in migrating to GTK-3.
9. Daniel Narvaez, with help from Bernie Innocenti, has gotten a buildbot running. Nightly build results from the sugar core can be found at [8].
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