An OLPC Development Model

[Eben Eliason]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 11:55 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> I look forward to people writing a simple "install activities" script
> for joyride, or if they get ambitious they can have a go at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_updater#Application_updater .
>
> A little script would certainly be appropriate to include in joyride.
> It would have been included in 703, but time constraints did not
> permit it.

I feel that now is a good moment to point out slide 2 in the new UI
design mockups (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Activity_Management#02).
 You'll note that a "Get more activities" option is listed in the
menu.  I'm not yet sure if I want this to be a menu option, or a
button in the toolbar, an activity itself, but I do think this is a
golden opportunity to make this an extremely friendly system regarding
obtaining and installing activities. (Thoughts on which of the above
approaches seems best are welcome, I'm leaning toward a toolbar
button.)

It also needs to be decided how the available activities are
displayed.  Initially we'd planned on simply launching Browse and
pointing to a predetermined URL (an "easy" way out, but requires
setting up the server side).  That requires including Browse as part
of the base image.  Another option is to use an extension of Bert's
script to fetch (potentially from a number of locations, if
necessary), a list of activities and format a list with nice icons,
titles, and short descriptions presented as a modal dialog, with
search/filters available as well. This might be a really nice
solution.  Since we already plan to have a means of installing more
activities, why don't we take this "hassle" we're faced with and turn
it into some forward progress that everyone can take advantage of?

A clean way to manage this might actually be an RSS feed which we host
somewhere, or an aggregation of several (the class/school/country may
wish to host their own as well).  Could we potentially appcast [1] all
the activities?

- Eben

[1] http://connectedflow.com/appcasting/