Carol, I think we agree on more things than we disagree on. As a software developer by trade I tend to think in terms of "what's the least you could do that could get the job done?" Software projects tend to get more and more complex as they go on, and if you don't start with something simple your project will go off the rails at some point. The lackluster support in Sugar for reading ebooks has been a gripe of mine ever since I got my G1G1 XO and discovered it could only read PDFs and that it wouldn't save the page number you stopped reading at in a way that would survive a reboot. I tried to improve things by writing Read Etexts and View Slides and that just made me *really* frustrated with Sugar.
The XO has a terrific feature in that it can fold up to be an ebook reader. If only the software for reading ebooks was as good! I don't own an iPhone, but I admire the "There's an App for that" commercials. They do a good job of selling the product. But suppose you bought an iPhone and found out that if you wanted to make a phone call that "There's an App for that." Actually, four different Apps, and you had to choose the App that handled dialing to phones belonging to the phone company your recipient used. And there was a Phone Directory App which would let you dial out using whichever App you liked from any number, but refused to remember which phone number belonged to which phone company. You had to be sure to pick the right one each time. Also, the Phone Directory only listed entries in the order you entered them in and could not sort them any other way. On the other hand, it would be *really* good at playing games. That's where I think we're at with Sugar today. There have been some improvements. In SoaS metadata like page number last read is saved across reboots, and you can choose what Activity to open your Journal entry with from the main Journal listing, rather than having to open the Journal details page to do it. The Read activity can read DjVu files in addition to PDFs. But there's lots of room for improvement. And one thing I'd like to see is that reading ebooks would be a function of Sugar itself, and there would be no Read Activities. I wonder how the OLPC project might have changed if it was sold as an ebook reader that could also run educational software. It brings to mind an old Woody Allen joke, where he claimed to own a sword that turned into a cane so the muggers would feel sorry for him. James Simmons _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
