[sugar] Mini-Conference Proposal: Toolbars & Tabs (or lack thereof)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder if the differences between Sugar and a regular window manager
>  aren't so severe that it might be worth offering a simple desktop
>  environment which runs within Sugar as a Activity?
>
>  You would download and launch this Activity, and its interface would
>  be a regular Linux desktop.  It would support multiple windows, a
>  "taskbar", a "start menu", etc. (I'm using Windows terms here). You
>  could install and launch regular GTK+ applications in it, and they
>  would not need to be "sugarized" at all.  The GTK theme used by the
>  Desktop would still match Sugar of course.
>
>  If we did this, we would not be stuck with trying to shoehorn third
>  party applications into a UI they were not designed for (one toplevel
>  window, no menus) and would conceivably be able to launch any Linux
>  app assuming the needed libraries were installed.
>
>  I'm not an X windows expert, but does this sound like possible way to
>  solve this issue?

Someone wrapped Xephyr in an activity, so you get something similar to
the Classic environment in OSX. You could run a full gnome or a single
application inside that activity.

But then the application would run in a different X server and
wouldn't be able to copy paste, drag and drop, wouldn't be able to use
hw acceleration, etc.

Anyway, the problem here are not "accidental incompatibilities" as
would be trying to run a KDE app in a GNOME-only installation. It was
decided to part from the traditional desktop scheme because we aimed
to offer a system that supports education, not office work.

And I don't think that we should try to shoe-horn applications into
activities. If an application's architecture separates the controller
from the view and thus can expose a simple view component without
controller stuff, then it's a relatively easy effort to wrap that view
inside a widget and provide python bindings. Thus kids can modify and
adapt all the python code around that black box immediately after
receiving the XO.

Regardless of that, I can understand how current application authors
may feel frustrated by the additional effort required to port apps to
activities, and of course welcome any contribution to make that
easier.

Apart from the debate of being easier or not to port apps with one or
another architecture, I would like to point out the fact that if the
project reaches its goals for the next year, there should be more
developers for our platform than for Maemo or even the whole GNOME. So
it's not like we are Apple, we'd have a much bigger potential in the
not so long term.

Also, GNOME apps are currently encouraged to provide those embeddable
view widgets, as today do Abiword, Evince, Mozilla,... because of the
GNOME Mobile initiative. Heard that someone was working on that for
Gnumeric and I'd bet wouldn't be that hard for Inkscape.

My point is that reusing all that code inside proper activities is not
so hard, there are just too little hands yet.

Please don't interpret my words as an opposition to increase
compatibility with existing applications, take it as one more point of
view on the problem.

Thanks,

Tomeu