Another sugar rant (was: x2o physics problem solving game)

[Eben Eliason]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Neil Graham <lerc at screamingduck.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 August 2008 7:08:33 am Alex Levenson wrote:
> Searching for X2o using the wiki search doesn't find it.  It's Called X2o!
> it's url is http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o for heaven's sake!  Somebody either
> fix the search or just change the search box to go to google.

Are you sure?  When I search for 'X2o' (case insensitive) I am taken
directly to the page you identified, bypassing any search results page
altogether.

> With regards to using activities on the XO I've tried to be accepting of the
> sugar interface style, but this activity crystallizes things for me.  I'm now
> prepared to move to the sugar-sucks camp.  I've used many and written a few

I think nearly all of us are in the
sugar-sucks-but-is-still-changing-lives-and-we're-gonna-do-everything-in-our-power-to-make-it-rock
camp.  We like it when people move from the sugar-sucks camp into
ours! ;)

> I'd like to be clear that I don't think there is anything done poorly in the
> X2o activity itself.  I think it all comes from having the sugar interface.
> The more I encounter sugar interfaced programs, the more I think Activities
> would be better off with just about anything else.

Specific examples would be extremely beneficial here.  Is it the
fullscreen nature of the window?  The toolbars? (Note, there's another
interesting design proposed for these:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Toolbars) The GTK theme?  There's
lots of stuff missing still, but feedback on the particulars of what's
already there would be great.

> I gave myself a long time to acclimatise, much longer than I would have for
> anything else, because the XO is really quite important.  I really believe in
> the goals of the OLPC project, but I cant use the XO effectively! My daughter
> can't use the XO effectively!

Perhaps you mean "efficiently"?  (Most of us would agree with you,
there.)  However, there are certainly thousands of kids using them
effectively despite the inefficiencies and bugs; the work we see
coming back from deployments proves this, and keeps all of us going
with the hope of making it far better in the future -- perhaps even
effective and efficient enough for us "spoiled" folk. =)

> At what point does a do-over make more sense?  I was prepared to take the
> resource usage and the slow bits and the joke that is the journal because
> they were all things that future work would have addressed.   The cumbersome
> user interface is a killer though because it's designed to be like that.

Again, without examples a rant is nothing but hot air.  What parts are
so fundamentally broken that not even future software updates could
fix them?  The Journal is a pretty good example of a fundamental part
of the system that's mostly non-functional at present, but we have
some good designs for it (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Journal)
and I expect that, at some point, hopefully soon, we'll also have the
resources to implement them.

- Eben