0.88/Notes

Please copy/paste "{{Translationlist | xx | origlang=en | translated={{{translated}}}}}" (where xx is Translation Team/ISO 639 language code for your translation) to 0.88/Notes/translations

HowTo [ID# 49871]  +/-

Team Home   ·   Join   ·   Contacts   ·   Resources   ·   FAQ   ·   Roadmap   ·   To Do   ·   Meetings

Sucrose 0.88 Release Notes

Introduction

Sucrose 0.88 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform, consisting of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities.

Sucrose is released every six months. Each new release contains new features, improvements, bug fixes, and translations. Sucrose 0.88 continues this tradition and is our fourth well-planned release to date.

You can learn more about Sugar itself by studying the Sugar definition or by reading the comic strip about the learning platform from Dongyun Lee. Even better, why not try Sugar?

What is new for users

Activity Toolbar redesign

The toolbar used in the Activities has been redesigned. The previous design using small text tabs to group toolbar options together caused a number of usability difficulties. Many of these issues have been addressed in the redesign. For example, the redesign provides a solution for the "how do I stop an activity" issue, pointed out in #452 (the older toolbar design did not provide an always visible "Stop" button, causing confusion for our young learners). Among the Activities, Browse, Write, Calculate, Terminal, Read, ImageViewer, and Turtle Art have already been ported to use the new Toolbar design, while work on many others is under way. See Features/New Toolbar Design for more details about the new design.

The new Browse toolbar design.‎ There is an activity toolbar containing the title entry, the share and the keep button.

The old Browse toolbar, for comparison

The new Write toolbar design.‎

The old Write toolbar, for comparison

Update to this version

Please use the instructions for your distribution (SoaS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc) of choice to upgrade to this release. Note that it may take a while until the release is packaged for each distribution. Please stay tuned for distribution specific announcements and watch out for updates at Get Sugar.

What's new for developers

The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.88 developer platform.

Widgets

• New Toolbars: Sugar has switched to a new toolbar design. The simplest example can be found in the hello world activity. If you want to group functionality into a secondary toolbar you can have a look at the terminal activity. To have a consistent layout over activities please group the edit and view toolbar to the left. The items on the toolbar should be aligned to the left.
• New Share button: The design of the share button has changed (0.86/Notes#New_share_button). If your activity does not support collaboration you can set the activity class member max_participants to '1' which makes the share button insensitive.
• CellRenderIcon: This new widget allows to place sugar svg icons in a gtk.TreeView. The CellRendererInvoker is used for the palette accordingly.
• RadioPalette: Base class for the ShareButton.
• PaletteWindow: A PaletteWindow widget has been added.

API

• To add the toolbar_box to the activity we use a toolbar_box property now instead of the set_toolbox method.

Dependencies

• Switch from Matchbox to Metacity. To activity authors this means that their windows need to be user-resizable which in turn requires that the layout adapts changes in window size.

Activity Authors guidelines

The md5 and sha module have been deprecated in python 2.6. Please clean up your sources accordingly. We encourage every author, fructose or other activity authors to follow the Development_Team/Code_guidelines. Please mind that we have the source view functionality enabled and that kids are able to have a look at the code. They hopefully find consistent and well written activities.

What's new for packagers

• sugar-base: new dependency: python-decorator
• Sugar: Metacity: The switch to Metacity as window manager is dependent on this commit that adds a command line option to disable autofullscreening maximized windows without decorations.
• Sugar: The keyboard control panel: libxklavier >= 4.0, python bindings >= 0.2
• Flash Activities: Distributions need to package the last version of Gnash (v9).
• Tabs in Browse: Hulahop version >= 0.5
• Write: Abiword 2.8 is close to be released and will be part of the Sugar Platform 0.86, so we need to have the latest release in the 2.7.x series packaged so we start testing it.
• Read: New dependencies for Read version >= 70 (needed for epub support): webkitgtk (Note: pywebkitgtk has to be >= 1.1.6), python-lxml, python-BeautifulSoup,
• sugar-datastore: LICENSE.GPL, README.txt files were renamed to COPYING and README; added AUTHORS and NEWS new files.

Compatibility

Collaboration in the Write activity will not work when the abiword backend is not the same (libabiword 2.6, 2.8).

Detailed changes

Glucose

• sugar
• sugar-toolkit
• sugar-base
• sugar-presence-service
• sugar-datastore
• sugar-artwork
• etoys

Getting the sources

If you want to package sugar for your favourite distribution or just want to examine sugar's lovely code ;) you can find all the source code of each module at the links below.

Glucose

• sugar-toolkit 0.86.0
• sugar 0.86.0
• sugar-artwork 0.86.0
• sugar-base 0.86.0
• sugar-datastore 0.86.0
• sugar-presence-service 0.86.0
• etoys 4.0.2319

Looking at the release cycle details

You can browse the notes of each development release in 0.114. Their respective sources are listed there as well.

Looking Forward to 0.88

Planning of the next release cycle has started at 0.88/Roadmap.

Credits

Many people contributed to this release indirectly, including testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the Wiki, outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this Sugar release possible.