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

[Wade Brainerd]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 3:09 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>  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.

I agree completely!  I have tried to shoe-horn applications into Sugar
(that's how we started Colors!) but it did not go well.  I have also
taken the time to properly build applications in Sugar and the result
has been worth it.

But it's important to understand that much of the complexity of
today's desktop applications is in the user interface design, and so
it's not a simple thing to just "wrap a new one" for Sugar even if the
code is already well organized.

I'm also concerned with advanced users (even kids) who are not
application developers and are limited to installing libraries, but
might not want to have to reflash with Ubuntu just to access something
like wxMaxima.

Providing a functional embedded desktop environment would be a great
stopgap measure to eliminate these complaints while the activity
library is filled in.  I'm just not sure about what would be needed to
make it work "well".  Full Gnome inside an Activity is probably too
heavy, but is there some stripped down version that could be used?

>  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.

This is true for "core" applications, but I think there is value to
considering those "extra" applications in the Linux world that might
have some use to students, say some obscure math program or video
editing tool.

Best,

Wade