Sugar Labs/Current Events
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This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at walterbender.org, and archived here.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)
Sugar Digest
1. It has been crazy busy. With the upcoming XO4 launch, Sugar with touch support will be making its début. The developer team has done a great job but we are lagging behind a bit on the activity level: Activities that use keyboard input need to be modified to use the on-screen keyboard; and now that tablet mode will be used more often, we need to better attend to the issue of screen rotation.
In order to adapt to the on-screen keyboard, there are two adjustments that need to be made: (1) use either a GTK Entry or TextView instead of directly querying the keyboard; and (2) make sure that the Entry is visible when the keyboard is visible. To address both issues, I have been mostly using GTK Fixed in order to reposition the Entry appropriately. But also, I have been using a strategy of moving the Entry to the top of the activity.
There are two issues with dealing with landscape vs portrait mode. One is to make sure that the work area of an activity accommodates the change in size and aspect ration. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is simply to define a square work are inside of a scrolling window. There are times when this strategy won't work, such as with Paint, but for the most part, it is a simple solution.
The toolbars are another matter. It is often the case that not all of the elements fit when in portrait mode. The default behavior of Sugar, to make a list on a palette that displays on the edge of the screen is somewhat lacking, both in that many toolbar items are either not shown or inoperable in that form. And aesthetically, it is not very Sugar-like. I've been experimenting with some different approaches to generating palettes, and also moving some toolbar elements around (e.g., moving some buttons to secondary toolbars). Alas, none of these solutions are idea or completely generalizable. But I think there are harbingers of a solution.
Another issue with touch is that Gtk2 ComboBoxes don't work. The problem has been fixed in the Gtk3 version of the Sugar tool-kit, but, not being a fan of Combo Boxes to begin with, I see it as an opportunity to minimize their use. For example, using bigger/smaller buttons is arguably an easier way to adjust font size using touch.
Ultimately, we'll want to add more gesture support as well. Many activities could readily support panning and zooming. And a "long" press can replace the un-Sugar-like reliance of right-click that some activities are using.
I've packaged many of these ideas into some experimental (and production) versions of some activities (Please see Abacus, Chart, Chat, Labyrinth, Portfolio, Speak, and TurtleBlocks). Feedback most welcome.
2. It occurred to me that the Web Services framework that Raul and I developed a few weeks ago might make a nice home for a simple classroom service: handing in homework assignments and receiving back comments from the teacher and fellow students. Such a service could be dropped right into the same framework we built for Facebook, so in the Journal, there would be a Share with (or Copy to) Teacher and comments would appear in the Journal detail view (and be directly integrated in the Portfolio). Simple, but potentially quite useful.
Tech Talk
3. Adam Holt reported on the School Server Hack Sprint held in Toronto (See [8]).
4. Daniel Narvaez has been making great progress on "Agora", his attempt to achieve the goals of the Sugar Learning Platform using the web technologies (See [9]).
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