0.86/Notes

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Sucrose 0.86 Release Notes

Introduction

Sucrose 0.86 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 0.86 continues this tradition and is our third 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.

Switch to Metacity window manager

Sugar has switched from Matchbox to a new window manager, Metacity. Matchbox was designed for small devices; it forces all applications to run maximized. Sugar can run on devices with larger screens. While activities native to Sugar are designed to be run maximized (full screen), some applications not specifically designed for Sugar can behave in unexpected ways when run with Matchbox. The switch to Metacity means that many "unsugarized" applications will run better inside of Sugar. We endeavour to ensure that "traditional" desktop applications run well in Sugar, without requiring programming or behavioural changes.

Flash Activities

Gnash has been added to the Sugar Platform, meaning that authors of education content can use Flash tools to create first class activities for Sugar.

Tabs in Browse

Some web pages contain links that are designed to be opened in a new window. The Browse Activity now opens these links in new tabs inside the main activity window, similar to the behaviour of most common web browsers, thus providing a better browsing experience. Note that this feature does not yet allow the user to explicitly open any link in a new tab or explicitly create a new tab.

Ad hoc Networking

New ad-hoc networking facilities allows you to connect with other Sugar users over wireless in an ad-hoc manner without relying on any wireless networking infrastructure. This is the so called "under-a-tree scenario", where children can work, play, and learn collaboratively in any place imaginable, without requiring any wireless access point, which for many children is unavailable or only available at school. (The One Laptop per Child XO-1 computer provides similar functionality with its firmware-based 802.11s (mesh) network.) Ad-hoc networking allows Sugar to use this feature with most of the wireless hardware commonly found on computers. Furthermore it allows one to share an Internet connection using the same mechanism. Fore more details see Ad-hoc network testing.

Read

The Read Activity now has support for Epub files. Epub is a standard format for ebooks which is gaining fast acceptance in the (e)book publishing and distribution community. A number of websites such as feedbooks.com, epubbooks.com and Google Books provide high-quality, Epub books for download at no charge. In addition to Epub support, this release of the Read Activity also lets one associate (add and edit) notes with bookmarks, and it has a more useful full-screen view that roughly indicates battery life without requiring the invocation of the Sugar Frame.

Software Update

The software-update control panel is now included in standard Sugar. It uses the Sugar Activity Library to check for and install the latest Activity updates available. This makes it easier for users to update to the latest version of a given Activity and it makes smoother for developers the process of publishing and distributing newer version of Activities.

Improved Accessibility

Some parts of Sugar (Journal and Home list view) have been modified to use Gtk+ widgets, instead of HippoCanvas, which had no accessibility support. This is a part of an ongoing effort to make Sugar work seamlessly with accessibility tools such as screen readers and magnifiers so that everyone can benefit from Sugar, regardless of physical or mental abilities. Among other accessibility enhancements, more Sugar tools now show their keyboard shortcuts to help their discovery and Activities in the activity tray frame use palettes that show both their names and text title.

Keyboard Control Panel Selection

The Sugar Control Panel has a new section for selecting multiple keyboard layouts, as well as the keyboard model. This feature will allow users who do not use the US QWERTY keyboard layout/model to easily switch to their preferred configuration. More information is available in this Feature documentation.

Home Favourites View Improvements

Resuming and starting new activities from the Home favourites view has been enhanced by simplifying the Activity palettes so that activities cannot be accidentally deleted or removed from the favourites view. All Activity management is now done via the Home List View. Tip: To quickly start a new activity without using the palette, one hold the <Alt> key and click an activity icon.

Improved File Transfer

The Journal "Send to friend" feature has been extended to support file transfers via a Jabber server, previously this only worked for machines on the same local network. This now allows one to transfer Journal entries to any available friends, regardless of the underlying communication mechanism (a remote Jabber server, or the local network). One can use the Neighbourhood View to add new friends.

Update to this version

Please use the instructions for your distribution (SoaS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc) of choice to upgrade to this release.

What's new for developers

The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.86 developer platform.

Widgets

New Toolbars

What's new for packagers

• 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.

Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)

Thanks to members of the worldwide translation team, who can be found on the localization mailing list, we have the following languages (listed alphabetically) which have significant support (more than 75% of the user interface translated):

• Arabic
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Japanese
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Tamil
• Vietnamese

Altogether, 25 languages have more than 50% of the user interface translated.

Compatibility

There are no known compatibility issues, as of today.

Detailed changes

Glucose

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

Fructose

• Terminal
• Log
• Read
• Browse
• Chat
• Write
• Calculate
• Image Viewer
• Jukebox
• TurtleArt
• Etoys
• Pippy

Fructose dependencies

• hulahop

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 0.85.8
• sugar 0.85.8
• sugar-artwork 0.85.4
• sugar-base 0.85.6
• sugar-datastore 0.85.4
• sugar-presence-service 0.85.3
• etoys 4.0.2319

Fructose

• read 74
• chat 66
• terminal 26
• imageviewer 12
• jukebox 8
• turtleart 68
• browse 113
• etoys 108
• write 67
• calculate 28
• log 23
• pippy 34

Fructose dependencies

• hulahop 0.5.2

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.