0.94/Notes

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Sucrose 0.94 Release Notes

Introduction

Sucrose 0.94 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform: Sugar promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. Furthermore it provides a flexible and powerful platform for activity developers.

Sugar is Free and Open Source Software and 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

The Keep button has been deprecated

The Keep button has been deprecated. The main reason was that many learners confused it with a save button and thought they would need to use it to save their works. To make a duplicate of an entry you can use the duplicate functionality that has been added to the entry palette in the Journal.

Duplicate option in the Journal

A duplicate option has been added to the entry palette in the Journal. The same option is available in the detail view.

Enhanced copy option in the Journal

The copy option in the Journal entry palette has been enhanced. It allows to copy to an external device and has an option to copy to the clipboard. The same enhancements have been made to the palette in the detail view. The palette for a file on an external device allows to copy to the Journal and to the clipboard. The detail view has been changed accordingly as well.

In previous versions when you clicked on the icon in the detail views it copied directly to the clipboard. This functionality has been moved to the palette itself, on left click the palette is opened and the learner is presented with the copy options.

Easier way to exchange files between the Journal and the underlying file system

To make it easier to exchange files between the Journal and the underlying file system the $HOME/DOCUMENTS folder has been made available in the Journal. For example if you have created an image in GIMP under GNOME and want to open it in Paint you can place it in the $HOME/DOCUMENTS folder and can access it in the Journal. This Feature has been requested by teachers a lot.

View Source for sugar-toolkit

An option to display the source code of the sugar-toolkit has been added to the view source alert.

View Source: duplicate option for an activity

An option to duplicate an activity has been added to the view source alert.

What is new for distributors and deployers

there have not been any changes as of today

What's new for developers

The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.94 developer platform.

Widgets

The custom widget AddressEntry used in the Browse activity as the url entry has been removed from the toolkit. Browse does use now a standard gtk.Entry instead.
The widget IconEntry is based now on a gtk.Entry instead of our custom widget. The API (which has some oddities like 'set_icon_from_name' instead of 'set_icon_from_icon_name') has been kept for now but will change as well in the near future.

API

The Keep button has been deprecated and should not been used in newly written code. It will be removed completely from the API later, please adjust existing activities accordingly.

Activity Authors guidelines

no guidelines as of today

What's new for packagers

The Sugar package depend now on xdg-user-dirs (e.g. the rpm is called xdg-user-dirs in Fedora). The dependency is needed by the code that determines the path of the DOCUMENTS folder used in the Journal.
ethtool is used in Sugar to determine the wireless firmware version displayed in the Control Panel. This have not been noted as dependency yet, even though used for a while already, if you have not listed it yet, please add it.

Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)

still to come...

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 here are the released bundles. If you are interested in the full changelog you can use the Sugar git repositories.

Glucose modules

Fructose modules

Looking forward to 0.96

For 0.96 we plan to focus on some architectural work that won't have a direct impact as perceived by most users. Sugar is a very thin layer of code that sits on top of hundreds of other components developed by other projects. There are ongoing changes to the components we depend on most directly, and we need to adapt Sugar to those changes so it keeps being shipped by Linux distributions and benefits from future improvements.

The changes include that the Python bindings for GNOME will be available dynamically through GObjectIntrospection rather then through the current static bindings provided by PyGTK. So a goal for 0.96 will be to port Sugar and all the activities to GNOME 3 through GObjectIntrospection.

Planning of the next release cycle has started at 0.96/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 and do review other's patches,

the maintainers that 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 a Sugar version to test with during the development cycle,

the testers for finding the smaller and bigger issues,

the release team and Development team for coordinating those efforts.