[Trac #1053] OLPC needs a usable GUI (i.e. not Sugar)

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#1053: OLPC needs a usable GUI (i.e. not Sugar)
--------------------+-------------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  gnu     |        Owner:  jg   
     Type:  defect  |       Status:  new  
 Priority:  normal  |    Milestone:  CTest
Component:  distro  |   Resolution:       
 Keywords:          |  
--------------------+-------------------------------------------------------
Comment (by jg):

 The difference here is that a number of OLPC folk have worked with
 computers and young children in the developing world (remember, our major
 audience are the kids who can't read yet, are just learning to read, or
 basic education), and the messy desk *doesn't work*.  It was designed for
 literate, developed world office workers.

 And the other focus is on collaboration: most learning is person to
 person, kid to kid, parent to kid, teacher to kid, kid to parent.
 Therefore a very high focus on collaborative applications, that will
 become clear as we move forward from here given the UI.  The "mesh view"
 and "buddies view" are central UI elements, not yet exploited, for
 building thos applications.

 I've watched my own kids (now age 9 and 12) go through this, with
 innumerable calls for help from Mom and Dad. In most parts of the world,
 Mom and Dad have never used a computer, and may be illiterate or semi-
 literate: we get questions like "What is the Internet?". We believe Sugar
 is much better for this primary audience; kids usually are only getting
 5-6 years of basic education. I think we have 2 remaining major goals we
 need to meet:
         1) make it easy to run Sugar apps on existing desktop
 environments, so that if people choose other environments the apps are
 still usable (and infect the whole community with building collaborative
 applications).  We expect the kids, as they get older, may find other
 environments more useful (at least if we can get everyone on board on the
 collaboration side!). And there are some truly neat Sugar apps being built
 that kids of all ages everywhere may want to run in whatever desktop
 environment they are using.
         2) make it easy for kids to run existing applications in the Sugar
 environment, so they can start experimenting when interested in more
 complex software.  So over the last 2 years or so, my daughter has gone
 from wanting very simple paint programs to where she takes Photoshop
 howto-s and replicates the results in The Gimp.

 The process, which we've been unable so far to spend time on but hope to
 soon, is ensure Sugar is "doing the right thing" with ICCCM and extended
 freedesktop hints where at all possible, and adding to the freedesktop
 standards where needed.  Secondly, I suspect it may be easier once that is
 done to adopt a more "standard" window manager in our environment, making
 full integration of complex apps in Sugar possible; matchbox was developed
 for PDA's where most applications were semi-custom.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1053#comment:17>
One Laptop Per Child <http://laptop.org/>