Re: SarynPaint: a Java program packaged for the OLPC
I think maintaining two parallel versions of the code in two languages would be a huge waste of effort for me, but if someone else wants to they are of course welcome to. I have neither time nor inclination to port it merely to work around the historical accident of Java not having been Open Source at the time Sugar was initially developed. Also, I think the UI of this program is actually more friendly to very young children by *not* being more Sugarized — there's no confusing Frame when they (inevitably) move the pointer to the edges of the screen, and since it doesn't (yet) have save support or text input there's really no reason for a toolbar or Journal integration. Mind you, minimal save/resume support might be nice to have on all platforms someday. On 2009-08-29, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Ben, On 29 Aug 2009, at 18:24, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: I think, then, that I would rather just ship it as an activity bundle for Sugar+Java or Sugar+OpenJDK, since the versioning issues (which OpenJDK version should I use, exactly?), licensing issues (GPLv2 GPLv2+classpath-exception for OpenJDK vs. GPLv3 for SarynPaint,) packaging unknowns (how does one run OpenJDK from a subdirectory, exactly?), and bloat make bundling a JRE inside the .xo ridiculously impractical. I'm halfway tempted to try to subset OpenJDK for this (to reduce bloat), but that seems like an even bigger nightmare. Sorry if this is a controversial comment, but would you considered porting the code to Python? It looks like a nice starter chunk of code for someone interested in Python and or Sugar Activities. Regards, --Gary ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: SarynPaint: a Java program packaged for the OLPC
Hi, and thanks for trying it out! On 2009-08-29, Mikus Grinbergs mi...@bga.com wrote: I haven't been able to test that .xo link on an actual OLPC yet, so feel free to pass along bug reports, experiences, etc. These days I'm running F11-on-XO1 on my XO-1s -- SarynPaint launches and runs on both my smparrish build os6 and on my mtd build soasxo59. Neat! I keep meaning to try that, and in fact this post just inspired to me to buy a big SDHC card to dual-boot a regular Linux distro from. It shows that just checked in minimal support for launching it from Sugar - when I call up Frame, and (while SarynPaint is in Move mode) navigate along the screen edges on which Frame shows its facilities, what continues to respond is SarynPaint itself. For Sugar usability, an .xo ought to disregard user inputs directed to Sugar. Also, the log created by SarynPaint would currently be unhelpful in case of trying to debug the Activity's own actions. When I tried it on my daughter's XO the frame was not visible (at least not by mousing to the screen border.) Is that what you see too? Obviously the program was originally not written for Sugar, and purposefully goes full-screen and hopes the window manager respects that and does not interfere. Use the ESC key to exit. I realize that this is not at all proper Sugar UI, and would be better described as full-screen X11 app launched from Sugar. I think, though, that it might be better for early hand-eye coordination to not have a distracting Frame at all. However, I can see the argument for consistency and if someone would like to improve the Sugar integration I'm happy to take patches. Did not have my external speakers hooked up - the voices were kinda faint. At the very beginning, the cursor had to be pre-positioned on the SarynPaint screen, in order to avoid the explanation text from vanishing before it could be read (in soasxo59 the explanation text vanished despite me trying to prevent that). I noticed this bug (on other systems, too!) and plan to track it down and fix it when I have a moment. On my systems, feedback to the user via voice is not always consistent. Sometimes the control-press (e.g., enter) is not picked up [silence indicates I need to repeat the mode change]. Other times the control-press does get picked up, but I hear no output [silence indicates I don't need to repeat the mode change]. Thanks! I also noticed this bug (on other systems, too!) and plan to track it down and fix it when I have a moment; I'm not sure, though, when I'll get to it. As usual, patches gladly accepted :) Thank you again for the bug reports and ideas, and thanks for trying it out! -Ben ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: SarynPaint: a Java program packaged for the OLPC
I think, then, that I would rather just ship it as an activity bundle for Sugar+Java or Sugar+OpenJDK, since the versioning issues (which OpenJDK version should I use, exactly?), licensing issues (GPLv2 GPLv2+classpath-exception for OpenJDK vs. GPLv3 for SarynPaint,) packaging unknowns (how does one run OpenJDK from a subdirectory, exactly?), and bloat make bundling a JRE inside the .xo ridiculously impractical. I'm halfway tempted to try to subset OpenJDK for this (to reduce bloat), but that seems like an even bigger nightmare. On 2009-08-29, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 07:29, Ben Wiley Sittlerbsitt...@gmail.com wrote: A friend of mine wrote a hand/eye coordination game called SarynPaint and recently released the source code. SarynPaint is written in Java, so you'll need to install OpenJDK to use it. I just checked in minimal support for launching it from Sugar and rolled a .xo activity bundle file. The project: http://sarynpaint.googlecode.com/ The activity bundle file: http://sarynpaint.googlecode.com/files/sarynpaint-1.xo How to get OpenJDK: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Java#Installing_OpenJDK_Java I haven't been able to test that .xo link on an actual OLPC yet, so feel free to pass along bug reports, experiences, etc. So, is there some way I could list the OpenJDK dependency in the activity.info file and have the system offer to download and install OpenJDK if it has not yet been installed? No, activity bundles are supposed to be self-contained, not depending on anything else other than the standard Sugar platform. As long as Java is not part of the Sugar platform, the JRE will need to be bundled inside every activity that uses Java. Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
SarynPaint: a Java program packaged for the OLPC
A friend of mine wrote a hand/eye coordination game called SarynPaint and recently released the source code. SarynPaint is written in Java, so you'll need to install OpenJDK to use it. I just checked in minimal support for launching it from Sugar and rolled a .xo activity bundle file. The project: http://sarynpaint.googlecode.com/ The activity bundle file: http://sarynpaint.googlecode.com/files/sarynpaint-1.xo How to get OpenJDK: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Java#Installing_OpenJDK_Java I haven't been able to test that .xo link on an actual OLPC yet, so feel free to pass along bug reports, experiences, etc. So, is there some way I could list the OpenJDK dependency in the activity.info file and have the system offer to download and install OpenJDK if it has not yet been installed? -Ben ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Yay!, Bee, See (ABC) software
Such a system sounds great to me! If it's similar to the widget formats supported by the Mac OS X's Dashboard, Konfabulator, and/or Opera that would be even better, since it would tie into an existing library of useful software. Basically, those use ZIP files with various custom layouts, content-types and HTML. I have constructed a widget package which worked in both Opera and Mac OS X's Dashboard, and it was not too difficult (only the Content-Type varied, which I handled using symbolic link on my Apache server.) -Ben On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 7:28 PM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote: BTW, this activity is a perfect example of what I was talking about with my 'web-activity' and sugar.activity.activity.WebActivity class proposals. You want a way to install it to the home screen, give it an icon, and have it launch seamlessly just like any other activity. As it is, I spent some time last month and ported Yay! Bee See to PyGTK so it would behave as a normal activity, but if we had the system I described in Sugar already, I wouldn't have done so. My link is http://dev.laptop.org/~wadeb/Yay!BeeSee-2.xo Best, Wade On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler bsitt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I've been playing around with this a bit, and I still can't figure out the xol files. When I download http://wiki.laptop.org/images/2/28/Yay-Bee-See-9.xol In Browse, it does get saved to the Journal, and when I start the xol file from the Journal it launches Browse with the main HTML file from the collection, and a subsequently launched vanilla Browse includes yay-bee-see in the images section of the Library. However, even after I keep both the .xol file and the Browse session, rebooting the machine causes yay-bee-see to disappear from the images section of the Library (and the kept Browse session to show a File Not Found message) until I open the .xol file again. Is this intended/expected behavior? Is there some way to keep user-installed Library Collections installed across reboots? Thanks, -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:08 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, that's a fine baseline. As you point out, I had a hard time with the license field; enter what you like but please do include a full LICENSE file in the bundle that provides specific licenses (and attribution where required), image by image. If you download an xol file onto your xo from a webserver that has mimetypes set properly (such as w.l.o) it should automatically install itself into your Library/ directory. I don't know about that page not rendering properly on an XO; what version of Browse are you running? SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:55 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler bsitt...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks! A few questions, though: 1. Is there any reason I shouldn't start with your version 2 .xol as my baseline? I'd like to update it to use the new lower-resolution, lower-quality images (which still look just fine on the XO-1 even in greyscale high-resolution mode zoomed out to the 1px = 1px scale.) 2. Is there some way to install the .xol more user-friendly than just unzipping it into the ~/Library directory? 3. I notice that in the description on the wiki for the bundle you wrote fdl text, pd, cc-by and cc-sa images. Some of the images are cc-by-sa and fdl, too. Also, the HTML text is actually pd (or at least it was in the version I released — of course you are welcome to license copyrighted derivative versions however you like.) 4. And finally, is there some reason the OLPC wiki does not work right when viewed from an XO-1? I had to go through URL-hacking contortions to open that page in Browse (it just said the page was empty otherwise.) Thanks, (and please pardon my ignorance!) -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Ben -- When you're zipping up the directory, if you add a metadata file in this subpath: library/library.info and give the resulting zip file the extension .xol, you'll have an XO library bundle. Here is a sample info file, with all required fields : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Yay-bee-see-library.info Note that the 'name' field in the info file should match the name of the root directory. Our standard is to increment the version # in the metadata every time you make a change; that allows tools like Sugar's software updater know when there are newer versions of packages available to install. SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler bsitt...@gmail.com wrote: yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only 4 MiB or so: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc.zip hosted version: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/index.html does that seem any faster? On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM
Re: Wine activity
That's awesome work! I was able to install Wine and use it, including firefox and a win32 application I had previously build using mingw32 under Linux on another PC and uploaded to a webserver, and then downloaded using firefox inside wine. However, I did notice the following oddities: 1. When I later resumed the activity from the journal, the wallpaper was gone and nothing worked, although the start-menu items for firefox were still there. 2. It was not clear to me how to save wine's state to the journal. 3. At some point the usual 'leave full-screen mode' icon appeared in the upper-right corner, but clicking it seemed to have no effect other than to make it disappear, i.e. no sugar UI appeared and the desktop size did not change. 4. Wine crashed when I used Firefox's download manager to open the location of a downloaded file (winefile appeared briefly, then the whole activity crashed.) I have no idea why yet, but perhaps there is some information left in a log file somewhere I will find. On the bright side, this means it's fairly trivial to run at least some windows-only software on the OLPC now, which is great when there's not yet a Sugar or Linux version. -Ben On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Vincent Povirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Wine activity has advanced to the point where I think it's ready for testing by actual users. The current package, development history, and my todo list are at http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine The intent of this project is to provide a shell that can be used to run Windows programs using Wine in the Sugar environment. It should be good enough that someone used to Windows can grab and install a Windows program without help, once the activity is installed. Ideally, the installer and software will both work fine in Wine and within the hardware limitations of an XO. In this ideal case, someone used to Windows should be able to operate it without help. If it does not live up to this ideal for platinum software (according to the Wine appdb) whose hardware requirements the XO meets, I want to know about it and hopefully fix it. Wine bugs and hardware limitations mean a lot of Windows programs won't work or won't work properly. On Linux, one can often push the compatibility much further than what works out of the box by looking at console messages (the log viewer works for this) and tweaking Wine. Don't expect everything to work perfectly, but don't give up if it doesn't. This is normal, even on Linux. Winehq.org has support channels for such cases (appdb, bugzilla, mailing lists, and the winehq irc channel). Most of the people there probably don't know anything about Sugared Wine, but collectively they should know more than I do about making Wine work in general. If a program doesn't work for you, you can go to any of those places for support. You can also email [EMAIL PROTECTED] That goes directly to me for now, but in the future (maybe the very near future) I may decide to send it somewhere public, like a mailing list, instead. Wine and the code that I developed for this project are licensed under the GNU LGPL. The entire package isn't quite LGPL because I included 7-zip. 7-zip is LGPL + unRAR restriction (you're not allowed to use the source code to create a RAR compressor). If you have a program that works well in this Wine package and would like to package it as a stand-alone .xo, please let me know. I already did most of the work for this so that I could include 7-zip and a firefox downloader/installer (and I could probably have included firefox itself if not for the fact that it would require uploading non-open-source code to repo.or.cz). Vincent Povirk ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Yay!, Bee, See (ABC) software
Hi, I've been playing around with this a bit, and I still can't figure out the xol files. When I download http://wiki.laptop.org/images/2/28/Yay-Bee-See-9.xol In Browse, it does get saved to the Journal, and when I start the xol file from the Journal it launches Browse with the main HTML file from the collection, and a subsequently launched vanilla Browse includes yay-bee-see in the images section of the Library. However, even after I keep both the .xol file and the Browse session, rebooting the machine causes yay-bee-see to disappear from the images section of the Library (and the kept Browse session to show a File Not Found message) until I open the .xol file again. Is this intended/expected behavior? Is there some way to keep user-installed Library Collections installed across reboots? Thanks, -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:08 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, that's a fine baseline. As you point out, I had a hard time with the license field; enter what you like but please do include a full LICENSE file in the bundle that provides specific licenses (and attribution where required), image by image. If you download an xol file onto your xo from a webserver that has mimetypes set properly (such as w.l.o) it should automatically install itself into your Library/ directory. I don't know about that page not rendering properly on an XO; what version of Browse are you running? SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:55 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks! A few questions, though: 1. Is there any reason I shouldn't start with your version 2 .xol as my baseline? I'd like to update it to use the new lower-resolution, lower-quality images (which still look just fine on the XO-1 even in greyscale high-resolution mode zoomed out to the 1px = 1px scale.) 2. Is there some way to install the .xol more user-friendly than just unzipping it into the ~/Library directory? 3. I notice that in the description on the wiki for the bundle you wrote fdl text, pd, cc-by and cc-sa images. Some of the images are cc-by-sa and fdl, too. Also, the HTML text is actually pd (or at least it was in the version I released — of course you are welcome to license copyrighted derivative versions however you like.) 4. And finally, is there some reason the OLPC wiki does not work right when viewed from an XO-1? I had to go through URL-hacking contortions to open that page in Browse (it just said the page was empty otherwise.) Thanks, (and please pardon my ignorance!) -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben -- When you're zipping up the directory, if you add a metadata file in this subpath: library/library.info and give the resulting zip file the extension .xol, you'll have an XO library bundle. Here is a sample info file, with all required fields : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Yay-bee-see-library.info Note that the 'name' field in the info file should match the name of the root directory. Our standard is to increment the version # in the metadata every time you make a change; that allows tools like Sugar's software updater know when there are newer versions of packages available to install. SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only 4 MiB or so: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc.zip hosted version: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/index.html does that seem any faster? On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 24 Nov 2008, at 17:21, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: Hi, I have just joined this list and read through the archives, but could not find anything similar. I also didn't find mention of anything similar on the OLPC Wiki. I recently wrote some software for use by my daughter on her OLPC. It runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a file: URI or over the network. I don't know whether it will be of interest to anyone else, but I have released the software to the public domain and packaged it along with scaled-down (1600x1200 or less) copies of some public-domain images and some copyrighted-but-free-to-redistribute images under GFDL, and various Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, Attribution, and Share Alike licenses. Individual attribution for each image is included in the application source code. Seems a great addition for the younger age range :-) I did notice that even on a high specced laptop (1.5Ghz, 2Gb ram, broadband connection) the background image was very slow to display (until it had been cached locally). One suggestion, 1600x1200 seems a bit large (even as a max size). For the XO, 800x600 (max!) would seem to be a fair max image size to save nand space and keep image quality. The XO screen is capable of 1200x900
Re: Touch pads
not sure whether this is the same bug/limitation, but i have noticed the touchpad goes haywire when my daughter uses it with a bit of food on her fingers (obviously i try to avoid letting this happen, but sometimes it does anyhow...) i just tried to simulate this. as a test i used an eyedropper to put 0.5ml of tapwater onto the touchpad. suddenly the entire vertical strip of trackpad containing the droplet becomes nonresponsive, but the rest of the trackpad works still. when i drag my finger through the droplet to remove it from the trackpad, leving my finger a bit wet and tacky, the trackpad subsequently feels very jumpy. once i dry off my finger, though, it works fine. i don't have instruments here, but a local weather site says: 59.8 °F / 15.4 °C Haze Humidity: 75% Dew Point: 52 °F / 11 °C On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 8:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the problem is that if tqwheejkweey can't duplicate the problem they can't fix it (they can change things, but they have no way of knowing if it fixes the problem or not) Well, right now I'm in a rather hot and humid location (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and will be here for 1 month, working. What things can I do to replicate it? Let the machine get very warm? Get very sweaty hands? This place is not dusty - not sure what would help this Are kids hands more likely to trigger it than adult hands? I have a 4 year-old that can help us. Does being grounded vs wearing rubber soled shoes make a difference? To Richard: What logs should I capture? Things to try? I somehow got the notion that models from the future would be helped with this defect somehow, but apparently that's not the case. Well, there *is* a new touchpad model in the works, I'm not sure exactly when it enters production. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Yay!, Bee, See (ABC) software
yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only 4 MiB or so: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc.zip hosted version: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/index.html does that seem any faster? On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 24 Nov 2008, at 17:21, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: Hi, I have just joined this list and read through the archives, but could not find anything similar. I also didn't find mention of anything similar on the OLPC Wiki. I recently wrote some software for use by my daughter on her OLPC. It runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a file: URI or over the network. I don't know whether it will be of interest to anyone else, but I have released the software to the public domain and packaged it along with scaled-down (1600x1200 or less) copies of some public-domain images and some copyrighted-but-free-to-redistribute images under GFDL, and various Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, Attribution, and Share Alike licenses. Individual attribution for each image is included in the application source code. Seems a great addition for the younger age range :-) I did notice that even on a high specced laptop (1.5Ghz, 2Gb ram, broadband connection) the background image was very slow to display (until it had been cached locally). One suggestion, 1600x1200 seems a bit large (even as a max size). For the XO, 800x600 (max!) would seem to be a fair max image size to save nand space and keep image quality. The XO screen is capable of 1200x900 in black/white, and 800x600 seems a reasonable number for it's colour resolution abilities: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display --Gary overview: I wrote some software using DHTML (JavaScript, HTML and CSS.) It's to help learn letters and numbers, and is intended to be used with adult supervision and involvement. It is fairly easy to customize it to use different images and support different alphabets simply by editing the contents of the style element in the HTML file. The software is very, very, very simple — it just echoes typed letters and numbers in a large, colorful font and shows a somewhat-relevant background image for each one. The images are various freely-usable ones I found on Wikipedia or in the Wikimedia Commons. View source code for full copyright information for the associated images. online version of the Yay!, Bee, See application: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.html an archive of the application (ZIP, ~15 MiB) including all images: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.zip blog post about it: http://bsittler.livejournal.com/15244.html background: My daughter (who turns two this week) has been enjoying her OLPC from last year's G1G1 program much more than I expected she would (originally I intended to wait until she was older and literate to introduce her to the OLPC, but she seemed to treat it as a favorite toy starting around the age of 18 months.) She likes the Record activity (she calls it Waving hand and uses it like a mirror-image mirror,) Skype (not bundled, but she uses it to talk to and see far-away family,) and listening to music (theclassicalstation.org). She also likes pressing buttons, rotating the ears and screen, and opening and closing the laptop. However, she seems somewhat frustrated by not being able to do things on it for herself (or as she puts it, do it self!,) so I thought I might write a small program where her keypresses give some feedback, and help reinforce her interest in the digits and letters of the alphabet (she loves being read to and recognizes many letters and digits, but does not seem to understand reading yet.) -Ben ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Yay!, Bee, See (ABC) software
thanks, i forgot to create the index.html symlink on that web server :) http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/ should work now. On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Sameer Verma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only 4 MiB or so: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc.zip hosted version: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/index.html does that seem any faster? Correct URL: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/yay-bee-see.html Sameer On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 24 Nov 2008, at 17:21, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: Hi, I have just joined this list and read through the archives, but could not find anything similar. I also didn't find mention of anything similar on the OLPC Wiki. I recently wrote some software for use by my daughter on her OLPC. It runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a file: URI or over the network. I don't know whether it will be of interest to anyone else, but I have released the software to the public domain and packaged it along with scaled-down (1600x1200 or less) copies of some public-domain images and some copyrighted-but-free-to-redistribute images under GFDL, and various Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, Attribution, and Share Alike licenses. Individual attribution for each image is included in the application source code. Seems a great addition for the younger age range :-) I did notice that even on a high specced laptop (1.5Ghz, 2Gb ram, broadband connection) the background image was very slow to display (until it had been cached locally). One suggestion, 1600x1200 seems a bit large (even as a max size). For the XO, 800x600 (max!) would seem to be a fair max image size to save nand space and keep image quality. The XO screen is capable of 1200x900 in black/white, and 800x600 seems a reasonable number for it's colour resolution abilities: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display --Gary overview: I wrote some software using DHTML (JavaScript, HTML and CSS.) It's to help learn letters and numbers, and is intended to be used with adult supervision and involvement. It is fairly easy to customize it to use different images and support different alphabets simply by editing the contents of the style element in the HTML file. The software is very, very, very simple — it just echoes typed letters and numbers in a large, colorful font and shows a somewhat-relevant background image for each one. The images are various freely-usable ones I found on Wikipedia or in the Wikimedia Commons. View source code for full copyright information for the associated images. online version of the Yay!, Bee, See application: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.html an archive of the application (ZIP, ~15 MiB) including all images: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.zip blog post about it: http://bsittler.livejournal.com/15244.html background: My daughter (who turns two this week) has been enjoying her OLPC from last year's G1G1 program much more than I expected she would (originally I intended to wait until she was older and literate to introduce her to the OLPC, but she seemed to treat it as a favorite toy starting around the age of 18 months.) She likes the Record activity (she calls it Waving hand and uses it like a mirror-image mirror,) Skype (not bundled, but she uses it to talk to and see far-away family,) and listening to music (theclassicalstation.org). She also likes pressing buttons, rotating the ears and screen, and opening and closing the laptop. However, she seems somewhat frustrated by not being able to do things on it for herself (or as she puts it, do it self!,) so I thought I might write a small program where her keypresses give some feedback, and help reinforce her interest in the digits and letters of the alphabet (she loves being read to and recognizes many letters and digits, but does not seem to understand reading yet.) -Ben ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Yay!, Bee, See (ABC) software
Thanks! A few questions, though: 1. Is there any reason I shouldn't start with your version 2 .xol as my baseline? I'd like to update it to use the new lower-resolution, lower-quality images (which still look just fine on the XO-1 even in greyscale high-resolution mode zoomed out to the 1px = 1px scale.) 2. Is there some way to install the .xol more user-friendly than just unzipping it into the ~/Library directory? 3. I notice that in the description on the wiki for the bundle you wrote fdl text, pd, cc-by and cc-sa images. Some of the images are cc-by-sa and fdl, too. Also, the HTML text is actually pd (or at least it was in the version I released — of course you are welcome to license copyrighted derivative versions however you like.) 4. And finally, is there some reason the OLPC wiki does not work right when viewed from an XO-1? I had to go through URL-hacking contortions to open that page in Browse (it just said the page was empty otherwise.) Thanks, (and please pardon my ignorance!) -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben -- When you're zipping up the directory, if you add a metadata file in this subpath: library/library.info and give the resulting zip file the extension .xol, you'll have an XO library bundle. Here is a sample info file, with all required fields : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Yay-bee-see-library.info Note that the 'name' field in the info file should match the name of the root directory. Our standard is to increment the version # in the metadata every time you make a change; that allows tools like Sugar's software updater know when there are newer versions of packages available to install. SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only 4 MiB or so: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc.zip hosted version: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/index.html does that seem any faster? On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 24 Nov 2008, at 17:21, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: Hi, I have just joined this list and read through the archives, but could not find anything similar. I also didn't find mention of anything similar on the OLPC Wiki. I recently wrote some software for use by my daughter on her OLPC. It runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a file: URI or over the network. I don't know whether it will be of interest to anyone else, but I have released the software to the public domain and packaged it along with scaled-down (1600x1200 or less) copies of some public-domain images and some copyrighted-but-free-to-redistribute images under GFDL, and various Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, Attribution, and Share Alike licenses. Individual attribution for each image is included in the application source code. Seems a great addition for the younger age range :-) I did notice that even on a high specced laptop (1.5Ghz, 2Gb ram, broadband connection) the background image was very slow to display (until it had been cached locally). One suggestion, 1600x1200 seems a bit large (even as a max size). For the XO, 800x600 (max!) would seem to be a fair max image size to save nand space and keep image quality. The XO screen is capable of 1200x900 in black/white, and 800x600 seems a reasonable number for it's colour resolution abilities: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display --Gary overview: I wrote some software using DHTML (JavaScript, HTML and CSS.) It's to help learn letters and numbers, and is intended to be used with adult supervision and involvement. It is fairly easy to customize it to use different images and support different alphabets simply by editing the contents of the style element in the HTML file. The software is very, very, very simple — it just echoes typed letters and numbers in a large, colorful font and shows a somewhat-relevant background image for each one. The images are various freely-usable ones I found on Wikipedia or in the Wikimedia Commons. View source code for full copyright information for the associated images. online version of the Yay!, Bee, See application: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.html an archive of the application (ZIP, ~15 MiB) including all images: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.zip blog post about it: http://bsittler.livejournal.com/15244.html background: My daughter (who turns two this week) has been enjoying her OLPC from last year's G1G1 program much more than I expected she would (originally I intended to wait until she was older and literate to introduce her to the OLPC, but she seemed to treat it as a favorite toy starting around the age of 18 months.) She likes the Record activity (she calls it Waving hand and uses it like a mirror-image mirror
Re: Yay!, Bee, See (ABC) software
Hi, I just uploaded (after several botched attempts) a new version which adds a LICENSE file with attribution and licensing information for each image. Does this look sufficient? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Yay-Bee-See-5.xol I'm not sure what I was doing wrong before, but it seems to work with the new version. As for the Wiki problem, the XO-1 can't access the following Wiki page (it gets a message about the page being empty:) http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Yay-bee-see However the following URL works fine: http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Yay-bee-see This happened both in Browse and in Firefox on the XO-1. Lynx and ELinks on the OLPC had no problem displaying either page, and neither did Firefox on a Mac. Thanks, -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:08 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, that's a fine baseline. As you point out, I had a hard time with the license field; enter what you like but please do include a full LICENSE file in the bundle that provides specific licenses (and attribution where required), image by image. If you download an xol file onto your xo from a webserver that has mimetypes set properly (such as w.l.o) it should automatically install itself into your Library/ directory. I don't know about that page not rendering properly on an XO; what version of Browse are you running? SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:55 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks! A few questions, though: 1. Is there any reason I shouldn't start with your version 2 .xol as my baseline? I'd like to update it to use the new lower-resolution, lower-quality images (which still look just fine on the XO-1 even in greyscale high-resolution mode zoomed out to the 1px = 1px scale.) 2. Is there some way to install the .xol more user-friendly than just unzipping it into the ~/Library directory? 3. I notice that in the description on the wiki for the bundle you wrote fdl text, pd, cc-by and cc-sa images. Some of the images are cc-by-sa and fdl, too. Also, the HTML text is actually pd (or at least it was in the version I released — of course you are welcome to license copyrighted derivative versions however you like.) 4. And finally, is there some reason the OLPC wiki does not work right when viewed from an XO-1? I had to go through URL-hacking contortions to open that page in Browse (it just said the page was empty otherwise.) Thanks, (and please pardon my ignorance!) -Ben On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben -- When you're zipping up the directory, if you add a metadata file in this subpath: library/library.info and give the resulting zip file the extension .xol, you'll have an XO library bundle. Here is a sample info file, with all required fields : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Yay-bee-see-library.info Note that the 'name' field in the info file should match the name of the root directory. Our standard is to increment the version # in the metadata every time you make a change; that allows tools like Sugar's software updater know when there are newer versions of packages available to install. SJ On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Ben Wiley Sittler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only 4 MiB or so: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc.zip hosted version: http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see-olpc/index.html does that seem any faster? On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 24 Nov 2008, at 17:21, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: Hi, I have just joined this list and read through the archives, but could not find anything similar. I also didn't find mention of anything similar on the OLPC Wiki. I recently wrote some software for use by my daughter on her OLPC. It runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a file: URI or over the network. I don't know whether it will be of interest to anyone else, but I have released the software to the public domain and packaged it along with scaled-down (1600x1200 or less) copies of some public-domain images and some copyrighted-but-free-to-redistribute images under GFDL, and various Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, Attribution, and Share Alike licenses. Individual attribution for each image is included in the application source code. Seems a great addition for the younger age range :-) I did notice that even on a high specced laptop (1.5Ghz, 2Gb ram, broadband connection) the background image was very slow to display (until it had been cached locally). One suggestion, 1600x1200 seems a bit large (even as a max size). For the XO, 800x600 (max!) would seem to be a fair max image size to save nand space and keep image quality. The XO screen is capable of 1200x900 in black/white, and 800x600 seems a reasonable number for it's colour
