0.82/Notes

Sucrose 0.82 Release Notes

What's New For Users

Sugar

Graphical Control Panel

Sucrose 0.82 introduces a graphical user interface to modify the preferences. The command line interface is still available. Due to the request from many users we added an option that you can tweak the activation delay of the frame. The activation by hot corners can be turned off completely. Detailed information on each section and how to use the panel can be found here.

The main page of the control panel with the available sections

Session management

In previous releases, if you shut down the system without closing the activities you would risk to lose you work. This is now fixed, all the user data is saved on shutdown.

New activity startup notification

The new visual feedback for activity startup integrates much better with the zoom level metaphor.

The browse activity starting up.

Object chooser improvements

The object chooser allows users to place objects from the journal into activities. In this release, we have added search, filtering, removable devices support, and a much better look.

Choosing an image to place in a Write activity

Multiple layouts in the home view and ability to move icons around

Users have asked insistently for a better way to organize lots of activities in the Sugar shell, so we have implemented new ways to list activities and operate on them.

All installed activities are shown in a list that can be searched. Activities can be removed from there and marked as "favorite". This means that these favorite activities will appear in the more restricted views shown below. The goal is to offer a simpler view with just the most used activities.

All installed activities are presented in a searchable list

Favorites organized in a ring and layout switcher

Favorites organized freely by the user

Window navigation using tab

You can cycle through the list of available activities using alt+tab (forward) and alt+shift+tab (backwards). This release introduced the visual feedback for this action. The frame will be revealed and reflect the cycling.

Cycling through the list of available activities using alt+tab

Browse

Autocompletion of bookmarks and history

If you type a word in the address entry you will be presented with a list of sites that you already visited, bookmarked, or seen in a shared browsing session.

The autocompletion dialog will offer you pages that you already visited before

Find in context

The search interface, placed in the edit toolbar, let you locate text in the content of a page. You can use the ctrl+f keystroke from any other tab of the browse activity to reveal the focused search entry. The search is type ahead like. You can use enter to get the next occurrence or you can use the next and prev buttons to find other occurrences.

The search interface let you locate text in the content of a page

Certificates exceptions

Some websites provide custom or invalid SSL certificates, which Browse usually refuse to load for security reasons. Unfortunately this is very common and prevent to access several web sites. We added the ability for the user to make an exception and load the site anyway.

Contextual palettes

Palettes provide secondary information and ways to invoke actions on graphical elements. In this release we have added to Browse the ability to copy links and images to the clipboard (drag and drop is more discoverable but less convenient sometimes) and following links.

Palette allowing to copy images to the clipboard

Palette allowing to follow links and copy them to the clipboard

Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)

Thanks to members of the worldwide OLPC Translation Project, who can be found on the localization mailing list.