Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)





== Sugar Digest ==

== Sugar Digest ==

2. Following up on a thread begun in mid July [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-July/013736.html] the Sugar oversight board passed a motion to empower Sugar Labs to award certificates to developers to acknowledge and celebrate their contributions to the Sugar Learning Platform. Several certificates will be made available, based upon the area of contribution. The certification mechanism is decentralized: the specific criteria for certification will be determined by the Sugar Labs team coordinators; in general, it will involve a repeated effort on behalf of the team's goals at a high level of quality.

1. The OLPC XO 1.75 machines (beta units) are starting to be distributed to developers. This machine is ARM based, which means that it will have superior battery life once all of the fine-tuning is complete. It also means that it uses some different components, e.g., audio circuitry, so there is some driver work to be done. But so far, so good.

As an example, the Activity team may issue a Sugar Activity Developer certificate to an individual who develops at least one Sugar activity that is subsequently posted on the Sugar Activity Library and be of sufficient quality to be approved for public release. The activity must also include internationalization, including the submission of a POT file to the Translation Team, and documentation, including the creation of a page in the wiki under the Activity category. As with the Contributor certificates, sign off will be made by the associated team coordinators, in this case the Activity team.

One of the nice things about the 1.75 is that the OLPC engineering team threw in a few additional sensors. Saadia Husain Baloch got the accelerometer working and I immediately wrote a Turtle Art plug-in (included with v114). Saadia wrote a fun 'etch-a-sketch' program in Turtle Art that works by shaking the machine.

3. Gary Martin, Manuel Quiñones, Gonzalo Odiard, Rafael Ortiz, and I have been busy working on the Sugar toolbars. You can follow our progress here: [[Design_Team/Toolbar Catalog]]. Our goal is to provide a consistent framework for all activities and to make sure that all of the Fructose activities have been ported to the 0.86-style toolbars before the next releases from both OLPC and AC.

Not to be outdone, I added an enhancement to the Portfolio activity while I was on a short flight last week. If you hit the left side of the XO, it will advance to the next slide. If you hit the right side of the XO, it will return to the previous slide. The person sitting next to me on the plane told me, "That's the strangest thing I have ever seen anyone do with a computer."

4. As part of the toolbar cleanup, I could not resist adding a feature to the Distance activity that I have wanted since the first time I saw it demonstrated by Ben Schwartz. There is now a toolbar for adjusting the units used – the default is still meters, but you can measure in centimeters, inches, feet, or yards as well. In addition, you can use the current distance being measured as your unit of measure, i.e., Distance will let you measure in 'Smoots' (See [http:wikipedia.org/go/Smoots]). I also made an updated activity page for Distance here: [[Activities/Distance]].

The bottom line is the more sensors the better: we want to give young learners more opportunities to observe and interactive with the physical world.

5. The OLPC team in Australia has a new discussion portal that has been seeing many posts from teachers using Sugar ([https://www.yammer.com/australianxoteachers]). One of the teachers, Frank Van Den Boom, was looking for a Powerpoint equivalent in order to let children manipulate pictures of currency. Van Den Boom has some learning exercises relating to currency that involve building equivalencies with different bills and coins. Of course, I immediately thought of how Turtle Art might be used for such an exercise. After doing the obvious: rendering images of money, I opted to write a plug in that provides a palette of coins and bills that can be used as if their were number blocks [[:File:Oz_currency.png]]; e.g., they can be used with the various arithmetic operators and they can be used with the various turtle commands. A silly but revealing example is shown here [[:File:US_currency.png]]. You can download the plug ins for various currencies from here: [[Activities/TurtleArt#currency]]

2. At the Desktop Summit held in Berlin earlier this month, the Senate of Berlin and TSB Technology Foundation Berlin presented an award for promising project ideas based on open software to be realized in Berlin. The prize was given to Raffael Reichelt for his idea of opening real labs as a place for children to learn and work with Sugar.

=== In the community ===

=== In the community ===

7. Nickelodeon and MTV in conjunction with OLPC is staging an international contest for the best narratives generated using Sugar (See [[Nick-MTV]] for details).

3. The September (10–11) [http://olpc-france.org/blog/sugar-camp-2011-in-paris/ Paris Sugar Camp] is building up momentum. Preliminary program:

* Saturday afternoon:  Plenary session (OLPC France’s activities, OLPC deployment feedback, etc.);

 

* migration path to GTK3 (Do we ship two toolkits? Do we migrate the shell and the toolkit and activities at once?);

* porting Sugar's theme to GTK3;

* other introspected libraries that need work (namely Network Manager)

For more background on the hackfest goals, which is a follow-up of the Desktop Summit gathering, see [http://www.itevenworks.net/2011/08/catching-up-with-sugar-running-gtk3-activities/] and [[Features/GTK3/DesktopSummitActivities]].

=== Tech Talk ===

=== Tech Talk ===

8. Daniel Drake has created [[Features/GTK3|a page in the wiki]] for discussing the migration to GNOME 3.0. There is a section for [[Features/GTK3/Desktop Summit activities|The Desktop Summit]], which is underway in Berlin. Raul and friends have already gotten a Sugar Hello World running (See [http://people.collabora.co.uk/~rgs/tmp/gtk3-activity-in-sugar.png]).

5. The Sugar localization/developer/design/activity/release/testing teams have been busy working on the 0.94 release. This release will [[0.94/Feature_List|feature]]:

* the reenabling of a filter in Home View (important now that there are so many activities);

* a more efficient Activity-startup animation;

* the ability to duplicate (with the intention of modifying) activities from the  View Source submenu

* $HOME/Documents added to the Journal Volumes toolbar to facilitate access to files created outside of Sugar;

* refactoring of pootle/git interface to bring the location efforts into sync

9. Hilaire Fernandes has announced Release 11.08 of DrGeo, which is fully working with the latest stable Sugar release (See http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4323). Additional features include:

Many thanks to everyone who has been working so hard on this release.

 

6. [[Community/Distributions/Mageia|Mageia]], a Mandriva-based distribution, now has Sugar support (See https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1969).

* the rendering speed was improved. Hilaire is looking for help in translation, especially for Spanish and English.

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

<gallery>

<gallery>

File:2011-Jul-30-Aug-5-som.jpg|2011 July 30th–August 5th (29 emails)

File:2011-Aug-6-12-som.jpg|2011 August 6th–12th (28 emails)

File:2011-July-23-29-som.jpg|2011 July 23th–July 29th(41 emails)

</gallery>

</gallery>

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.