[spam] Re: Active activities as Widgets

[Gerard J. Cerchio]

Eben Eliason wrote:
>>>>> Sugar will gain a feature called overlay chat, once we've got higher
>>>>> priority collaboration stuff completed, which will automagically add
>>>>> chat functionality to any (sugarised, python) activity.
>>>>>           
>> Not quite what I had in mind, so I'll go ahead with my chat widget and
>> publish a wiki page on it.
>>     
>
> Can you elaborate on the inadequacies you see in this design?  It
> would be useful as we move forward with considerations for the
> ubiquitous chat interface.  Unless specifically necessary to the
> activity in some fashion, we'd prefer to depend on this interface,
> preventing the need for individual activities to implement custom
> solutions which can come at a loss of consistency and a gain in
> activity size and duplicated code.
>
> - Eben
>   
There are some activities where the chat is an integral part of the 
participants' experience. In my case, chatter during the Go game may be 
nonexistent to multiple lines of interactive tutorial per move to 
razzing and praise from any of the observers. This is why I plan to have 
a mute button that mutes all chat from observers. Unchecked, the button 
allows kibitzing from all XO's in the buddy panel that joined the PlayGo 
activity.

This is not the functionality that I interpreted from Bert's comment:

    I thought this was intended to be a feature similar to the frame (and
    actually summoned by the frame key), layered on top of the activity,
    so it actually would work for *all* activities, Python or not.

    - Bert -

I may be wrong in interpreting the ubiquitous chat interface as a full screen overlay on top of the application where the child must either chat into the overlay or switch modes to play the game. Are you suggesting that the ubiquitous chat can be relegated to its own panel on the activity's screen so there is no mode switching between chat and the "underlayed" activity?  Would either of the two (or more) participants in the activity be able to mute observers? I find both of these functionalities fundamental to the activity experience and the tutored activity experience. 

Also, being that most of the video processing is offloaded in the Geode, I look forward to morphing the chat panel into a video call to my Go opponent. The PlayGo application takes very little resource, so there is plenty of ommf left over to run the video call. It would be the next best thing to playing in the same room.

- Gerard