Activity Team/Resources
Getting started in Activity development
If you have no experience developing Sugar activities and want to get started, these resources should help you get going.
Setting up a Sugar environment
If you use Linux, your best bet is to install sugar-jhbuild. You will be able to develop in your native environment, treating Sugar as just another desktop application.
If you run MacOS X or Windows, you will need to set up an emulator. For Mac OS X, see Supported_systems/Mac. For Windows, see Supported_systems/Windows.
To develop efficiently using an emulator or a real XO, find an editor which supports editing files over a SFTP connection. Komodo Edit is a good example.
Python Reference & Tutorials
Python is the language Sugar is written in and is also used by most activities. If you don't already know Python well, you should familiarize yourself with it before continuing.
PyGTK Reference & Tutorials
PyGTK is the user interface toolkit used by Sugar activities. Bookmark these two links as you will reference them frequently during development.
The following sections of the PyGTK tutorial are most relevant to activity development.
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Getting Started
- 3. Moving On
- 4. Packing Widgets
- 5. Widget Overview
- 6. The Button Widget
- 7. Adjustments
- 8. Range Widgets
- 9. Miscellaneous Widgets
- 10. Container Widgets
- 12. Drawing Area
Sugar Activities & API
This tutorial will introduce you to the basics of creating activities.
Bookmark this link, it contains the official API documentation for Sugar. It is currently quite sparse, the source code is included with the documentation and it's useful to have that at your fingertips.
Cairo Graphics
Cairo is the graphics library used in Sugar. The tutorial is a good introduction to the API as well as vector graphics programming in general.
Sugar Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)
These pages give a good introduction to the thought process behind the Sugar environment and will help a lot when designing your activity.
JSON introduction
JSON is a data format commonly used to store activity data in the Journal.
Git introduction
Git is the version control software used by OLPC. It is a distributed version control system and is quite powerful, but requires a lot of command line use.
Activity Development Resources
This is an open area for posting links related to activity development.
References
- http://docs.python.org/ The official Python documentation.
- http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/index.html PyGTK API reference
- http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygobject/index.html PyGObject API reference. Contains a few important things missing from the PyGTK API such as timers and idle callbacks.
- http://api.sugarlabs.org/ The official Sugar API documentation (quite sparse but includes all the source code).
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_almanac
- http://pygstdocs.berlios.de/ Python GStreamer bindings.
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines The design behind the Sugar interface. Useful when planning your activity.
- http://cairographics.org/documentation/pycairo/ Cairo Python API reference
Tutorials and Whitepapers
- http://diveintopython.org/ An online book which teaches Python step by step.
- http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/index.html A very informative step-by-step introduction to PyGTK.
- http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook Introduction to activity development by OLPC Austria.
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Activity_Tutorial Another introduction to activity development.
- http://www.tortall.net/mu/wiki/CairoTutorial A great introduction to Cairo in PyGTK and vector graphics drawing in general.
- http://www.json.org/fatfree.html An overview of the JSON data format.
People
If you have a question, don't hesitate to ask the activity team. We are happy to help and can often save you a lot of hunting for answers.
We hang out in #sugar on irc.freenode.net, and you can always post questions to sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org.