#5662 HIGH Never A: Sugar needs to provide a chat widget for integration into all activities

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#5662: Sugar needs to provide a chat widget for integration into all activities
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 Reporter:  Phil    |       Owner:  marco         
     Type:  defect  |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  high    |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  sugar   |     Version:                
 Keywords:          |    Verified:  0             
 Blocking:          |   Blockedby:                
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 This bug ties into #3310.  While every activity has an (unused) text
 channel associated with it, none of the activities actually use it.

 Just about every activity imaginable could and '''should''' make use of
 such a thing.  Having to Alt-Tab to a separate Chat activity to talk about
 the paper you're working on, the piece of art you're painting, or the game
 of Go you're currently deep into ... these are the sorts of things that
 take you out of the task at hand, slow down your working speed, and will
 keep people from collaborating at the levels that the XO should encourage.

 Because just about every activity imaginable should and could make use of
 this text channel, Sugar should provide a consistent "chat widget" that is
 trivial to add to just about any Activity that facilitates the use of the
 text channel.  Without this widget, every developer will end up
 reinventing the wheel when they realize how important integrated chat
 facilities are, which is a waste of time and effort that could go into
 improving the shared-between-all chat widget or the application itself.

 There will be, of course, some applications whose needs are so specific
 that use of a built-in widget would not provide all they need.  But I
 firmly believe that such cases would be few and far between.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5662>
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