Sugar Labs/Current Events: Difference between revisions

1. I was on a flight from Miami to Boston with Reuben Caron last night during which we discussed the hot-button topic of Flash games. Reuben was on his way back from a deployment that was heavy into Flash and was looking for a way to wean itself from a dependency on deprecated software that was both opaque and power hungry. Having just finished porting a Flash game to Sugar--it really is not so difficult--I suggested that we encourage the deployment to Sugarize their Flash assets. So we took a quick scan through their library and chose a reflective-symmetry game as a place to start. Two hours later, we had [[Activities/Reflection|Reflection]] running in Sugar. Version 2, which I wrote on the train into Cambridge this morning includes collaboration and a mode of symmetry not available in the original Flash game. (At the urging of Sandra Thaxter, I have added a [[Activities/Reflection#The_backstory|backstory]] with a blow-by-blow description of the porting process.)

Ultimately, it comes down to sustainability. It is my opinion that deployments are capable of building capacity and writing simple Sugar activities that they can tailor to their needs, and this is a skill that pays off in the short term--no need to sustain Flash--and the long term--they learn to build tools to solve problems.