Sucrose 0.90 Release Notes
Introduction
Sucrose 0.90 is the latest version of the Sugar learning environment: Sugar's focus is ease of use, stability, and first-class internationalization. Sugar is Free and Open Source Software and provides tools for learning. Furthermore, Sugar provides a flexible and powerful platform for activity developers. Sugar consists of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities. This new release contains many new features, performance and code improvements, bug fixes, and translations.
What is new for users
Remove the Presence Service
Tomeu Vizoso from Collabora has been doing a great work to remove the Presence Service. There are no directly visible changes for the user but the overall collaboration experience should be more stable.
Sugar Ad-hoc networks
To mimic the mesh behavior on devices where mesh hardware is not available and make the "under a tree"-scenario possible the Sugar Ad-hoc networks have been added. The Feature will add three default Ad-hoc networks, for channel 1, 6 and 11. They will be represented with designated icons in the neighborhood view. Simon Schampijer from OLPC has been working on this Feature and back ported it as well to Sugar 0.84.
Enhanced color selector
A new color selector is available for the control panel, thanks to the ongoing efforts of Walter Bender and the design team. Originally proposed for 0.88 this Feature went through several design iterations and finally consensus was reached. Now, we are excited to hear what the learners think about it.
Spiral Home View
Walter Bender has been working on another Feature during this cycle. The Spiral Home View is an enhancement to the Home View to enable the display of more icons. The idea is that after the circle becomes too large, rather than shrinking the icons, it morphs into a spiral.
New ordering options in the Journal
Andrés Ambrois has been adding new filtering options to the Journal. You can order now by size, creation date and modification date. The Feature originally implemented for Dextrose and sponsored by activity central has been found it's way successfully into 0.90, too.
New Keybindings for the Frame and Journal
Daniel Drake has been adding keybindings for the Journal (F5) and the Frame (F6). This will help to access those important views quicker on hardware where there is no designated key.
Turtle Art
The most visible changes are the incorporation of some new blocks, such as the 'Fill' block for created filled polygons, Gray, Black, and White blocks, and the 'Turtle Sees' block, that enables the turtle to directly interact with its canvas. There is also a new site for uploading and downloading Turtle Art projects.
Turtle 'sees'
Please see 0.90/TurtleArt for more details.
Etoys
Sugar 0.90 includes the latest Etoys release. Some of the new features in Etoys 4.1 are DrGeo, speech bubbles, a timer tile and settable preferences. Also, the QuickGuides have been translated into several languages.
DrGeo in Etoys
Speech Bubbles
Translated QuickGuide
An important change is that projects are not saved automatically anymore when you exit the activity. Instead of the regular Stop button, you will see an Exit button:
Find out more in the 4.1 release notes.
Sugar Activities
While we bundle a small subset of the Sugar Activities within Sucrose, most of the Activity "activity" can be tracked by visiting the Sugar Activity Library.
We have recently surpassed 3.6-million Sugar Activity downloads! There are hundreds of activities available for download in a variety of categories!
Thanks to all the activity maintainers and developers for making this happen.
| Category | No. of Activities |
|---|---|
| Search & discovery | 36 |
| Documents | 13 |
| News | 3 |
| Chat, mail and talk | 6 |
| Media creation | 25 |
| Programming | 13 |
| Maths & science | 85 |
| Maps & geography | 5 |
| Media players | 1 |
| Games | 60 |
| Teacher tools | 107 |
Recent additions
Recent additions include:
| Activity | Description |
|---|---|
| Dr. Geo | Dr. Geo is an interactive geometry activity. Dr. Geo allows one to create geometric figure plus the interactive manipulation of such figure in respect with their geometric constraints. It is usable in teaching situation with students from primary or secondary level. It is simple and effective with some unique features as scripting and Smalltalk programming. |
| Pukllanapac | A puzzle: Move the pieces until the circles are all solid circles. |
| Constellations Flash Cards | This program teaches the constellations by means of a flash-card-like interface. The program draws a constellation and the student has to pick the correct name from a list of five possible choices. |
| gtranslator | A Sugarized version of the translation file editor "Gtranslator" The GTranslator activity allows to translate the po files locally. This should allow users without a permanent Internet access to translate off-line the localization files downloaded from the Pootle translation server and to contribute to the localization of Sugar to their own language. |
| Words | A multi-lingual dictionary with speech synthesis. |
| VNC Launcher | This activity helps you broadcast your screen to another computer. It will automatically launch a VNC server (X11vnc) and display your IP address. You can then connect and view the screen of Sugar on another conmputer using any VNC client (e.g. TigerVNC, UltraVNC Viewer, RealVNC, etc). |
| Sun Moon Music | Sun-Moon Music MC - Realtime Sonic Environments for Children, Multiple MIDI Controller version. Collaborative exploration and performance encouraged. Requires 1 or more MIDI controllers. This version of Sun-Moon Music is especially designed for collaborative exploration and performance. All MIDI control devices must be set to the same channel. |
| Get Books | The Get Books activity lets users search and retrieve books from a variety of sources (Internet Archive, Feedbooks, etc). It supports the OPDS protocol for book discovery. |
| Star Chart | This activity will display a map of the sky showing the position of the visible stars, some of the larger and brighter deep-sky objects (DSOs), the "classical" planets, the sun and the moon. |
| XaoS | XaoS is an interactive fractal zoomer. It allows the user to continuously to zoom in or out of a fractal in a fluid, continuous motion. This capability makes XaoS great for exploring fractals, and it’s just plain fun! |
| Turtle Art Mini | Turtle Art Mini is a simple graphical programming environment. It is modeled on the Logo programming language and it emphasized graphical expression by learners new to programming. (Turtle Art Mimi is a subset of the Turtle Art activity – AKA Turtle Blocks) |
| Super Tux | A Sugar clone of the Super Tux game. |
| Abacus | Abacus is a simple, customizable abacus activity for Sugar. |
| Slide rule | Sliderule is a simple, customizable slide rule activity for Sugar. |
New experimental activities
These are activities under development that may be of interest to Sugar users:
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What is new for distributors and deployers
What's new for developers
The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.90 developer platform.
Widgets
Add ErrorAlert inherited from Alert.
API
Print warnings about the deprecated activity.info fields.
Dependencies
New API has been added to telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut to support the work on the collaboration framework, which results in needing 0.9.16 for tp-gabble and 0.3.13 for tp-salut.
One of the goals of the collaboration refactoring was dropping functionality in sugar that has been implemented in telepathy-mission-control, so Sugar now depends on tp-mission-control 5.4.3.
Activity Authors guidelines
There are still many activities that do not use the new activity toolbars introduced in 0.86. We encourage the switch to use the new toolbars as there have been huge improvements in usability (e.g. stopping an activity).
Jim Simmons has written a guide to writing Sugar Activities (Please see Make your own Sugar Activities!) which details how to convert your activity to the new toolbars without compromising performance on old Sugar systems.
What's new for packagers
New API has been added to telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut to support the work on the collaboration framework, which results in needing 0.9.16 for tp-gabble and 0.3.13 for tp-salut.
One of the goals of the collaboration refactoring was dropping functionality in sugar that has been implemented in telepathy-mission-control, so Sugar now depends on tp-mission-control 5.4.3.
Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)
Compatibility
There a no known compatibility issues, as of today.
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.
Getting the sources
If you want to package sugar for your favorite 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 modules
- sugar 0.90.1
- sugar-datastore 0.90.0
- sugar-toolkit 0.90.0
- sugar-base 0.90.1
- sugar-presence-service 0.90.1
- sugar-artwork 0.90.0
- etoys 4.1.2388
- hulahop 0.7.1
Fructose modules
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 0.92
Introspection!
Planning of the next release cycle has started at 0.92/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.
We want to especially thank:
- the Infrastructure team which does all this great work in the background without which the development would not be possible at all,
- the deployments that provide the development team with feedback from the field,
- the Design team which guided the design of features with UI changes or impact on the workflow,
- the Translation team which makes sure that Sugar is enjoyable in the local languages of our users,
- the developers that submit patches for new features and bug fixes,
- the maintainers that review patches and make sure their code is shippable and which provide packagers with new tarballs,
- the packagers which provide distributions with new Sugar packages,
- the SoaS team for providing during the development cycle a Sugar version to test with,
- the testers for finding the small and bigger issues,
- the release team and Development team for coordinating those efforts.