Wade,
Thanks for pinpointing the code I should look at. I printed out the
whole thing yesterday, and there's a lot to it. It does look better
commented than the other stuff I've been struggling with.
Just FYI its View Slides where I mean to put the collaboration stuff.
Read Etexts currently works just like the Read activity for
collaboration. When another user joins the activity he gets a complete
copy of the book. This actually works better in Read Etexts than in
Read, because text files are smaller than PDFs, and because my Activity
actually saves the book in the Journal when you receive it, whereas when
I last looked Read did not. Where I still have problems with Read
Etexts in terms of collaboration is:
1). When the book is shared the person joining sees the title of the
book. However when the book is saved to the Journal it is given the
title Read Etexts, not the title of the book. I know how to change the
title in the Journal entry, but not how to get the title of the book
being shared. Read seems to get this from metadata in the PDF.
2). When I resume a book that I got from joining the book will be
downloaded again if it is still being shared, even if there is no need
to do so. Also, the book I am resuming will be shared, even if I don't
want to do that. Once you start sharing there seems to be no way of
turning it off.
The interest in Read Etexts is for its text to speech feature, not
sharing. With any luck I'll get them both working.
Thanks,
James Simmons
Wade Brainerd wrote:
Hey James,
FYI here is the collaboration code in Colors!
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/colors/repos/mainline/blobs/master/colors.py#line641
It's fairly well commented but let me know if you have any questions
about how it works, or what you should do differently in Read Etexts.
I totally agree that Etexts should be a killer app for the XO.
As an aside, does anyone know if there is a manual way to force the XO
screen into sunlight mode?
-Wade
On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:56 AM, James Simmons
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Wade,
I'll have to check out the code in Colors! What I really need is
some sample code and some good docs on the APIs available. What I
have now was copied from the Read activity, and not all of it is
clear to me. If I understood what APIs were available that would
be a big help. I will welcome feedback on my code once I have
something good enough to criticize, but I'm not there yet.
Thanks,
James Simmons
Wade Brainerd wrote:
Hey James,
I can help you out with this if you want.
Your collaboration design sounds fine to me. I did something
similar in Colors! where certain parts of the UI are disabled on
the joining instances.
What point are you at now? Do you need an example to get started
with, or feedback about existing code, or just ideas about which
APIs to use?
Best,
Wade
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 4:55 PM, James Simmons
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Benjamin,
I had been using two machines to develop my Activities. One
ran Xubuntu
and used the sugar packages provided with the Sugar Live CD
that someone
made up. These were not perfect, but it was a simpler way to
set up a
Sugar test environment than anything else available at the
time. My
second box was running openSUSE 10.2 and I attempted to install
Sugar-jhbuild on it with middling success. I had both
pointing to the
Collabora server to test sharing, and what I found was the
sharing
through that server worked OK for small files (like Read
Etexts used)
but took forever for slideshows, and frequently ran out of
gas in the
middle of a transfer. As for collaboration between two
instances of
Sugar with no jabber server between them, that never worked
at all, even
a little bit.
As of last night both machines have Fedora 10 with the Sugar RPMs
installed, so this should eliminate lots of problems I had in
the past.
I don't expect it to make large file transfers through the
jabber server
any faster, though. Plus, in my opinion copying a file from
one XO to
another would be better done as a function of the Journal.
It isn't my
idea of what real collaboration should be. The VNC idea, while
worthwhile, doesn't excite me either.
As an XO user I have no use for collaboration. I have nobody
to play
with. I could strip the collaboration code out of both my
Activities
and have something more than adequate for my own use. My
goal is to
create Activities that will get other kids excited about
using them. My
idea is a modest step in that direction. If I get that much
working
other ideas may come.
I would like to stick with API's that are currently available
for a
couple of reasons:
1). I want to use the Sugar environment in Fedora 10. Now
that I
finally have a robust test environment I don't want to lose it.
2). I want to make the Activity available to the largest
number of
users possible.
I think telepathy might do the job for me if I just understood it
better. All I'm asking it to do is send some messages to a
list of
buddies and have them initiate some file transfers. Chat is
already
doing the first part, I think, and the Read code might be
persuaded to
do the second.
Thanks,
James Simmons
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