MarketingTeam/TODO/What's New for Developers/Sugar 0.84: Difference between revisions

With the new version of Sugar, 0.84, we have made a lot of progress in our goal to encourage Sugar users to appropriate the technology. We do not think that our users should be satisfied to be just consumers of Sugar; we would like them to understand how Sugar works and to feel

empowered to make improvements. This is why we have been working towards making it as easy as possible for them to modify Sugar such that it is better suited to <em>their</em> personal and collective needs.

There are two aspects of Sugar that are sympathetic to our goal of user modifications: (1) it is written in Python; and (2) it is distributed as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software">Free Software</a>. Python is an interpreted programming language that is very easy to understand and modify, and being Free Software means that users have the rights to use, modify and redistribute it.

Operating under the belief that the separations between code and content and between consumer and producer are artifacts of the <em>old</em> software and media industries, we have been working during the last months on three areas that lower the barriers to entry for people that wish to modify Sugar. We call the removing of limits on possibilities, *removing the ceiling*, and the lowering or easing of entry ramps, *lowering the floor* for computing success.

In previous releases, only Etoys and some simple activities such as Chat and Read had the capability of displaying their source code, letting the user drill deep into how the activity works. For 0.84, we have extended this ability to every activity. It works better for activities that are written in an interpreted language, e.g., Python, but if a compiled activity includes the source code, users will be able to “view” it and, since Sugar makes people smarter, they'll be able to understand how it works.

[screenshot from http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.84#View_Source]

The authors of some activities, for example Browse and TurtleArt,

provided some additional <em>drilling</em> capability to their

activities. The users can see how their Turtle Art programs look as

Logo code; curious readers can peek into the HTML code of a web page.

href="http://api.sugarlabs.org/sugar.activity.activity.Activityclass.html">Activity.handle_view_source</a>

method, thus replacing the standard dialog by an activity-specific

implementation. And for providing an additional <em>code representation</em> like HTML or Logo, then <a>Activity.get_document_path</a> can be overridden to provide a file path to it.

For the same effects, authors of activities written in languages other than Python can

the Control Panel by adding a new section, adding a new device to the

Frame, or defining a new keyboard shortcut. You only need to put your

Python code, following the API guidelines, at a certain place and the

cycle. Nevertheless, people have been writing little widgets, like a

<h2>Using Etoys, Mozilla, Abiword, and Evince in your activity</h2>

Embedding Mozilla into your activity will give it browser abilities, like

rendering html and executing javascript. For Python activities, run

You can watch for even better integration with the web in Sugar 0.86.

Abiword offers a powerful text processing widget with advanced features like

those found in word processors. It also offers collaboration that allows

several users of your activity to edit a text buffer simultaneously

across the network. You can base your work on <a

Evince is a document viewer that will render PDF, PostScript, and other document

formats within an area of your activity's window. Python coders can check

And now, stop reading nonsense and start coding, you lazy potential hackers!