[dev] Re: [project leads] Re: [dev] Proposal : OOo4Kids as official part of OpenOffice.org Project
On 10/08/2009 eric b wrote: Doing that (reducing/optimizing OOo) is technically extremely interesting, for a lot of reasons. OK, I see that OOo4Kids has many more ramifications than what the name seemed to suggest at first glance, and that you have thoroughly considered them all. Thanks for the interesting links, and looking forward to seeing a presentation/demo at the OOoCon in Orvieto! Regards, Andrea Pescetti - Italian N-L Project Lead. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.org
Re: [dev] Re: [project leads] Re: [dev] Proposal : OOo4Kids as official part of OpenOffice.org Project
Hi Eric, all, first of all i would like to propose to move any further discussion on only one mailing list. Maybe dev@openoffice.org because the d...@education is not part of this thread. eric.bachard wrote: Hi Juergen, Juergen Schmidt a écrit : Martin Hollmichel wrote: I like and support this idea, me too and i support the idea as well. Thank you very much for your support too ! I was a big fan of StarOffice4Kids project Same for me : Long time ago, I even asked for see the sources, but for some reasons, I never found them. Long time after, when the need became obvious for the Eucation Project to provide an Education oriented office suite, I was very early in contact with Stella Schultze, to discuss with her about design issues, and some other reasons I don't remin exactly. And indeed, she suggested to have a look at StarOffice4Kids. with more or less the same idea. I agree I derived StarOffice4Kids name, to create the OOo4Kids one. Indeed the idea is similar. I don't know ho wthings where done with StarOffice4Kids, but we have decided to strictely follow what the teachers ask (in fact, they must demonstrate every need). Did you the same ? Can you tell me more about that ? I can't answer your question i wasn't really involved in the project and it was done by an external vendor. The colleague who mentored this project doesn't work for Sun anymore. Nevertheless, there is at least one big difference : because of the slow / poor / old machines most of the schools have, we decided to not use Java ( StarOffice4Kids is mostly Java if I'm not wrong), but maybe was it only a prototype ? yes, probably the better way is to modify the existing user interface... StarOffice4Kids used the officebean and put an own simplified Java UI around. Formally : create a new branch, completely independent of , including milestones, like OOo does what do you mean by completly independent ? I would expect that this branch should kept in sync with OOo releases ? Work on the same things should be done on the same code base. For example Eric talked about performance. Edu performance projects could be seen as sub projects of the performance project with a special focus on educational things, maybe driven as university project ... In my vision of the Education Project working on performance issues, there are - I'd say - gurus, who do constitute the Performance projects core. On Education Project side, mentors and students who respectively teach and learn the good practices, and, for the best of the students, work on performance improvements. When the idea, and the resulting code will be enough, we'll join the performance meeting, and propose our work to be evaluted. To be frank with you, I have some doubs yet another project/sub-project will help there (ihmo there is no need to complicate more), but I can be wrong. well i don't talk about a real sub project. See it more as virtual project. One further effort to improve the overall performance under the umbrella of the performance project. And what is the performance project. It is one further aspect of the normal and always ongoing development umbrella. As i have mentioned earlier i personally don't like our structure with all the different projects, many of them are useless and are not really projects. Other are very active and span a much bigger scope. So i personally work on the OpenOffice.org project in different areas ;-) The really new stuff from a user perspective is the interaction with this specific user group kids, the OO users of tomorrow. Not only : the teachers are involved too. Most of the scheduled changes have been proposed by them, and without them, nothing would have been possible (they know better than us what is possible). that sounds very good and interesting Other extremely important thing: OOo4Kids is the way to enter in schools with free software. yes of course and as i mentioned before, the kids are our users of tomorrow and they are the business leaders and decision makers of tomorrow ... This is from my point of view very important and can be partly achieved or addressed with a customizable UI. I think this is not sufficient. We need to implement more than what we have today, and integrate more Education specific contents and so on. Believe me or not, but the only thing people want (not only teachers), is : simplify the UI. On MAc OS X side, this is the rule 20% visible / 80% hidden law. i haven't said that we have everything in place and i am sure that we have to do much more. But i see an overlap with the UX team here and doesn't it make sense to work closer together. Teachers and kids are one further user group with a different focus as normal office users. My main point here is if we can find a way to customize our UI in the way that it becomes quit easy and efficient. We can define different UI themes for different user groups. One for
[dev] Re: [project leads] Re: [dev] Proposal : OOo4Kids as official part of OpenOffice.org Project
Hi, Le 9 août 09 à 12:40, Andrea Pescetti a écrit : I support the idea of a version of OOo tailored for 7-12 years old students. And I say you thank you very much, for your support ! That said, I expected that the initial effort went more in the direction of including additional cliparts, providing educational content, In fact, the OOo4Kids project, as just a little part of the whole, is not made for that, because there is something else already existing, to fit the need. But let me explain more : the main objective of the Education Project, is to create a strong bridge between the Educationnal World, and OpenOffice.org Project. For that, we (not only me, but the people who participated to the IRC meeting, and the organization) have choosen 3 directions/axes: Point 1: create a network of academic correspondants ( and schools ! ) Concerned public: teachers, for cooperative work, provide feedback, link them with other OpenOffice.org Projects, represent us in local events (*Education* oriented only) Point 2: propose a space for content (pedagogical purpose only). Campus Libre, and our next toy Concerned public: teachers, students for cooperative work, around OpenOffice.org and pedagogical contents (only, nothing use of OOo) Point 3 : attract new developpers (see Education Proejct Effort on the wiki). Concerned public: schools, professors, students, developers, professionals .. and so on Shortly : OOo4Kids is the way we to rely 1 and 3, thus, to work on 2. So, the need is more complicated that the apparence let imagine, and what you are talking about is already existing (though, a bit young). Please search for CampusLibre on http://www.educoo.org website. (btw, feel free to provide whatever Educational material: it will be welcome) P.S. : to avoid boring people, and for further information about the entire structure, please read : http://eric.bachard.free.fr/ Education/LinuxDays2009/en-US/Linux_Days2009_en-US_ericb.pdf simplifying the UI: more or less, the same indications I read in http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page Simplify the UI is almost started (like menus in writer already, searching how improve the fonts, and so on). All of this is continuous work. Port important changes, make everything build, work, fix bugs, is the mandatory first step. And yes, I assume : the 1.0 will not integrate everything (excepted if 10 devs join the project today, and work all the summer on OOo4Kids :-) Instead, this list of 1.0 goals seems very aggressive in the direction of reducing/optimizing OOo, And why not ? :-) The content, respecting the need and the reducing / optimizing, respecting the reality, are complementary there : we need to provide something simple (7-12 children) and light (old machines, or XO, gdium low power netbooks). Everything is compromise in this situation. Nevertheless, if you have a better solution to make the software work on poor in ram and powerless machines, please tell us. I'd be really eager to read your solution :-) which gets almost no coverage on http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/ I'm glad you consider OOo4Kids with such interest, but what you wrote about the coverage is not true. This is the beginning (see the creation date), and everything is not concentrated on the wiki you mentionned : we have other places, where things are progressively set up. For example, in parallel, we work with teachers, and teachers managing teachers .. an so on, more people, institutions than it appears. And we must progress prudently, even silently from time to time. and which will probably distract from the educational goal. Sorry, but no. We never have been so close to the Educational goal, even doing optimization :) (the one who will bring the most to OpenOffice.org). Apparently, we temporarly do not work for elementary level, but what we do does concern all levels, including high schools. Doing that (reducing/optimizing OOo) is technically extremely interesting, for a lot of reasons. First, because we must have a good knowledge of the build process, and of the sources too. Second, we need to assume portability, stability, and even more. Third, we do all that with students (real engineers schools students), whom we explain how it works, how to trace. In fact, we teach them OpenOffice.org, and more generally Open Source way of life, but without disturbing the upstream process. Last but not least, our contacts with schools participating to the effort are extremely promising. As example, the last two days, we started to play with OpenOffice.org + Valgrind with two students from Epitech Paris. Starting from nothing one month ago, both know already the basics of gdb, build OOo and OOo4Kids on Linux and Windows. Believe me or not, but a lot of engineers schools would like to have such alive courses or their students. Do I
[dev] Re: [project leads] Re: [dev] Proposal : OOo4Kids as official part of OpenOffice.org Project
Hi Martin, Sorry, was away all the day yesterday. Martin Hollmichel a écrit : eric.bachard wrote: [please continue the discussion on the dev@openoffice.org mailing list] The OpenOffice.org Education Project proposes to drive the following experimentation : - create a dedicated branch in the OOo source code repository (means hosted by OOo Project) for a 7-12 years software, derivated from OpenOffice.org, and made and maintained by OpenOffice.org project. I like and support this idea, Thank you very much for your support :-) Formally : create a new branch, completely independent of , including milestones, like OOo does what do you mean by completly independent ? Not sure wy wentence was enough precise, and the reasons are multiple: First, if we provide commit access to students, we take some risks, and avoir them to commit on DEV300 or whatever other branch would be great. Second, to avoid legal issues, we replaced the Sun copyrighted icons and everything we considered as causing such issue with new icons and other design. At other places, e.g. with the png loader I implemented for the splashscreen (saving 340 kB in the binary), we added new files, who are used just in case the build env OOo4Kids is defined, we modified the start centre, will reuse (in 2.x) it as design pattern for new wizards, ad so on. Last, but not least, the current localization on windows (NSIS) breaks the current OOO .sdf files. Not sure this will be easy to mix all that with OOo source code. As reminder, the 1.0 goals are only : - decrease the binary size (the current archive is around 80MB on windows, 272 MB decompressed) - be sure it works on poor in ram and powerless machines, e.g. on XO ** - be stable and work as correctly as possible on Windows (I did the port), Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), and Linux (all possible ports) - make a first approach with simplify the UI, in touch with teachers, respecting their need. Open question : will all locales have the same needs for 7-12 children ? Major changes will concern the 2.x or superior (everything is explained on http://wiki.ooo4Kids.org ) .. and so on I hope all of this (maybe I forgot other reasons), will help you to understand what I meant with independance. I would expect that this branch should kept in sync with OOo releases ? Yes, that's the case: the 1.0 version uses and is in sync with the 3.2 branch (I resync'ed my changes with DEV300_m54). Once the OOO320 branch will be created, we'll continue with it. Regards, Eric **see : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project/Effort#Various_adaptations__on_Sugar_-_i.e._Linux_-_.28click_me.29 -- Education Project: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project Projet OOo4Kids : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page L'association EducOOo : http://www.educoo.org Blog : http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news - To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.org
[dev] Re: [project leads] Re: [dev] Proposal : OOo4Kids as official part of OpenOffice.org Project
Hi Juergen, Juergen Schmidt a écrit : Martin Hollmichel wrote: I like and support this idea, me too and i support the idea as well. Thank you very much for your support too ! I was a big fan of StarOffice4Kids project Same for me : Long time ago, I even asked for see the sources, but for some reasons, I never found them. Long time after, when the need became obvious for the Eucation Project to provide an Education oriented office suite, I was very early in contact with Stella Schultze, to discuss with her about design issues, and some other reasons I don't remin exactly. And indeed, she suggested to have a look at StarOffice4Kids. with more or less the same idea. I agree I derived StarOffice4Kids name, to create the OOo4Kids one. Indeed the idea is similar. I don't know ho wthings where done with StarOffice4Kids, but we have decided to strictely follow what the teachers ask (in fact, they must demonstrate every need). Did you the same ? Can you tell me more about that ? Nevertheless, there is at least one big difference : because of the slow / poor / old machines most of the schools have, we decided to not use Java ( StarOffice4Kids is mostly Java if I'm not wrong), but maybe was it only a prototype ? Formally : create a new branch, completely independent of , including milestones, like OOo does what do you mean by completly independent ? I would expect that this branch should kept in sync with OOo releases ? Work on the same things should be done on the same code base. For example Eric talked about performance. Edu performance projects could be seen as sub projects of the performance project with a special focus on educational things, maybe driven as university project ... In my vision of the Education Project working on performance issues, there are - I'd say - gurus, who do constitute the Performance projects core. On Education Project side, mentors and students who respectively teach and learn the good practices, and, for the best of the students, work on performance improvements. When the idea, and the resulting code will be enough, we'll join the performance meeting, and propose our work to be evaluted. To be frank with you, I have some doubs yet another project/sub-project will help there (ihmo there is no need to complicate more), but I can be wrong. The really new stuff from a user perspective is the interaction with this specific user group kids, the OO users of tomorrow. Not only : the teachers are involved too. Most of the scheduled changes have been proposed by them, and without them, nothing would have been possible (they know better than us what is possible). Other extremely important thing: OOo4Kids is the way to enter in schools with free software. This is from my point of view very important and can be partly achieved or addressed with a customizable UI. I think this is not sufficient. We need to implement more than what we have today, and integrate more Education specific contents and so on. Believe me or not, but the only thing people want (not only teachers), is : simplify the UI. On MAc OS X side, this is the rule 20% visible / 80% hidden law. I would expect the same code base but customized for the specific needs of kids. A minimized feature set and a kids related UI etc. A special branded and customized OpenOffice version if you want. Yes, something close to that. But new features will be proposed (starting 2.x) Anyway it's a very good idea and i will support it where i can. Thanks again :) Eric -- Education Project: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project Projet OOo4Kids : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page L'association EducOOo : http://www.educoo.org Blog : http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news - To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.org
