Hi Ben,
An IRC chat would be good. Do you have any thoughts on discussion
topics? On our end, it will probably be another couple of months
before Grant / Jeffrey are ready to release the first round of work
they've done on the re-architecture project. In the meantime however,
I can familiarize myself a bit more with how things work in Sugar.
One question that springs to mind is:
Are you thinking of Chandler as an UI layer for managing all the
user's data? Essentially providing a "task management / calendar"
view that cuts across all your "Activities"? (I imagine that
currently, this is the primary function of the Journal?)
Or, would Chandler be one of the Activities that is logged in the
Journal?
Mimi
On Sep 29, 2008, at 2:35 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
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Mimi Yin wrote:
| Hi Ben,
|
| I'm the product designer on the Chandler Project. Chandler on OLPC
| sounds interesting indeed.
Wow, cool!
| As Davor pointed out, porting the existing codebase isn't practical.
| However, we are in the midst of a re-architecture effort that
might of
| interest to your development team.
Oh well. That's not unexpected; most desktop applications today
are too
heavy for our target hardware.
| Grant recently kicked off a thread about it on the dev-list:
|
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2008-
September/010300.html
That is definitely interesting. It might be fun to have an IRC
meeting,
at least, to learn about each other's projects. The problems that
we are
trying to solve are ostensibly very different, but the solutions we
are
designing have some striking similarities. Many of the features
described
there are things we are trying to integrate directly into our
OS/environment infrastructure.
For example, all data in Sugar is stored in the Journal, labeled
with tags
and filtered by search within the tag and full text. Also, the entire
system is designed for network collaboration. There are
differences of
course; our collaboration system is focused on live, real-time
collaboration. The system can run over the internet, but is also
designed
to run serverlessly over a LAN, so that it works in the high Andes
where
there is no internet connection and not enough of a power grid to
run a
local server. Sugar's network system is almost entirely drawn from
the
Telepathy libraries.
| I imagine though that the OLPC's target user (young students in
| developing countries) will have different use cases for Chandler
than
| the target user we envisioned when designing the current app.
|
| I'm happy to talk more about how you envision OLPC users making
use of
| an app like Chandler. It might be interesting to build a "Lite"
version
| of Chandler on the re-architecture branch that is more suited to the
| needs of your user base.
I haven't drawn up anything like a full requirements document, but
I think
it would be nice if Sugar users could (1) schedule their own lives
through
time/dated to-do items (like which homework assignments are due
when), (2)
share these items easily over the network to create meetings (like
soccer
practice or study group), and (3) have audible alarms for some events
(like an alarm clock to wake up early on school days). As a separate
matter, we currently lack an e-mail client, though creating one is
a hard
problem because Sugar is designed to operate with only intermittent
network access.
In general it seems to me that our target users have something in
common:
they are attempting to process more information than they can
structure.
In your case this is because the volume of data is tremendous and
varied;
in our case it is because our users are too young to comprehend
complex
structures.
OLPC has many deployments in countries like Ethiopia, Nepal, Mongolia,
Rwanda, and others where the dominant calendar is non-Gregorian, so
I have
a special interest in calendar-independent scheduling and sharing.
- --Ben
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