[sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Martin Sevior]

On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 18:54 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior <martines at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
> >> I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple
> >> development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many
> >> other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of
> >> demand for this from the field?
> >>
> >> -walter
> >>
> >> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> >> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> >> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >> > Hash: SHA1
> >> >
> >> > Chris Ball wrote:
> >> > | Another useful feature would be for
> >> > | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does.
> >> > | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on.
> >> >
> >> > See also #7447.  Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all.
> >> >
> >
> > Hi Folks,
> >        Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we
> > haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background
> > colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature
> > for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord
> > is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write.
> >
> > I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea
> > though. The document will quickly become a mess.  Though if the kids
> > want to do this they can.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Martin
> 
> It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a
> collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking,
> so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will?
> 

AbiWord has change tracking but my experience with it is that it is more
trouble than it's worth. That said, there is a bug in AbiWord-2.6.4 so
that if you turn change tracking on all changes in a collaborative
document are marked with the same colour. I'd better fix this so that
different users get different colours during a collaboration session.

Is there some feedback from the field about how kids are finding
collaborative writing? Do they use it all?

Cheers

Martin