Sascha silbe

Please see my homepage for contact information. You can also send emails to my sugarlabs.org and activitycentral.com accounts (silbe@). On FreeNode and OFTC my IRC nick is silbe.

Country

Germany

Timezone

CET (UTC+1) / CEST (UTC+2)

Medium to long term Sugar plans

The goals

• Make it hard to lose work accidentally
• Make it safer to run potentially untrusted or buggy code
• Make Sugar easier and better to customise by users so they "feel at home" and work more efficiently
• Attract developers
• Increase interoperability with non-Sugar systems and parts thereof
• Accessibility
• real Single Sign On

The means

• Modularise Sugar core so users / developers can mix-and-match
  • split the "zoom levels" into separate modules
    • on low memory systems (XO-1) a single executable handles all zoom levels by default
    • on all other systems there are separate executables
    • replacing a single (or multiple) zoom level(s) with alternative implementations possible
    • bugs in one zoom level don't affect the others
    • shared UI framework uses GTK instead of HippoCanvas, icon view allows Neighbourhood-like searching and list view allows Home View-like searching
  • split out the Journal
    • let user "bless" an activity to provide the special services (switch to Details View, Object Chooser)
  • split out the Frame
  • activity.info -> .desktop, activity and non-activity .desktop launcher on home screen
  • use XDG start-up notification instead of custom protocol
• Rainbow
  • run each activity / application in a separate session, identifiable and killable from the Frame
    • show "activity start failed" screen if all processes finished (rainbow-run returns) before start-up notification has indicated the activity is running
    • if start-up notification times out, show "activity start failed" screen with option to wait a bit longer or abort
    • kill remaining processes on failure (timeout)
    • keep activities in Frame until all processes have exited
    • add option to kill session (i.e. all remaining processes) to Frame
  • "legacy sessions": start XDG applications in a session as describe above
    • full X session including window manager, using VNC
    • replace GTK file chooser dialog with Object Chooser invocation
    • set $HOME to temporary directory, save & restore the contents on Stop resp. resume
    • kill off window manager and "standard" daemons (e.g. gconf) after application returned
• Replace copy of gnome-session with configuration files for and dependency on latest gnome-session
• Version support
  • eventually integrated with in-activity Undo/Redo
• gpg-agent and/or gnome-keyring (GPG, SSH, X.509, hardware token support)
  • in-Frame pinentry (allow/deny request, password optional) highlighting the activity (isolated session) that requested the operation
  • automatic "log-in" to (SL, XS) web sites using client "certificate" (server extracts public key and uses it for identification/authentication, supports multiple keys per account)
• Telepathy client changes
  • interoperability with non-Sugar Telepathy clients
  • Account Manager (blessed activity or control panel section)
    • Salut account added by default, but deactivatable
    • not sure how exactly to handle it, but we should support registering to multiple XSs and require only a single UI interaction for doing so (add Jabber account automatically, but deactivatable like all others)

TODO

• Add "The benefits" section
• point out which goals have progress metrics that are cheap to measure

Potential future design work

• Journal entries on external media: Indicate whether the data file was changed, so that the preview is stale now? (silbe)
  • Some previews might be (re)generated automatically. Because this might take considerable time, the details view would need to indicate (re)generation is happening, e.g., via a "loading" animation.