On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 7:54 PM, John Watlington <w...@laptop.org> wrote: > > On Sep 10, 2013, at 5:04 PM, Sameer Verma wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Caryl Bigenho <cbige...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> >> One of the things that makes Sugar the ideal learning platform for >> children (and youth) is the wonderful compatibility of so many of the >> Activities ... both from Activity to Activity and from student to student. >> This facilitates the sort of learning we are all hoping to see more of... >> creative problem solving, project based learning and cooperative learning. >> Without this ability to integrate parts of projects, it would just be >> another collection of apps. >> > > I did not want to muddy the picture by injecting my own viewpoint, but now > that I've heard from others (on and off list) it is clear that the split is > driven by the role they play in the ecosystem. > Most technologists have come up with reasons why they don't think a complete > Sugar experience would work on Android. Therefore, activities must run like > any other app on Android. On the other hand, as Caryl said, "Without this > ability to integrate...it would just be a collection of apps". > > Somewhat knowing the limitations of what can be done with Sugar stuff on > Android, but disregarding that for a minute, I would say that Sugar as a > *platform* is an experience. It has a UI. It has a UX. Everything from the > Zoom interface to the activities to the Journal is Sugar. We have taken the > original "Sugar on the OLPC XO" experience and replicated that to the > classmate PC, SoaS, and other spins and distros, but in none of these cases > did we break the holistic Sugar experience. Now, along comes a popular OS, > and because the tech parts don't fit, we are advocating breaking up the > pieces and taking whatever flies. Memorize will become one of the few > hundred thousand apps on Android. > > I disagree. > > It's like saying we'll do the cat sprite from Scratch, but nothing else. > It's like saying we'll do the birds and pigs from Angry Birds, but not the > slingshot. Sugar, without all its pieces isn't worth the trouble. > > > Sameer, > I disagree somewhat with your thesis (and am very glad you started this > discussion.) > > From a technological standpoint, it is actually probably easier to implement > what you describe: > Sugar as a monolithic Android application, which takes over the entire user > interface when > launched. The reason I never considered it seriously was the larger > ecosystem. > > The reason to move to Android from Linux is two-fold: > - Chip vendors are dropping Linux support in favor of Android. The cheap > chinese ARM > vendors only support Android. > - Android/iOS are where application development is happening. There is a > much larger > community of Android developers than Linux or Sugar developers. > > The hope was to provide the infrastructure underlying Sugar (the Journal > datastore and > collaboration) as Android services, encouraging their use in new Android > applications. > In this model, the Journal is another Android application, accessing the > Journal datastore service. > New Sugar activities written in HTML should be capable of running in Sugar > on Linux > or as Android activities (although perhaps with different execution > wrappers). > In this manner, perhaps we can enlarge the Sugar community with developers > mainly > targeting Android. If we pursue Sugar as a single Android application, > with embedded > Python activities, we are isolating ourselves from the Android community. > > The danger of this approach is the loss of an integrated UX. This could be > addressed > by customizing the home UI, in the same manner that the XO tablet has a > custom home UI > implementing the Dreams interface, but that would require "rooting" the > tablet in some manner. > But the native Android UI isn't that bad... > > Cheers, > wad > > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel >
My two cents: To add to Caryl's point about tools vs applications, there is no reason why we can port the tool-like nature of the core Sugar apps to Android. Solving the datastore problem means we can interoperate between objects with these tools... a Sugary approach that is largely missing in Android. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel