Wrapping Sugar activities for other desktops

[Martin Langhoff]

Must preface this noting that I am relatively naive about Sugar
internals. "Your thoughts are stupid and your face ugly" may be the
most appropiate answer to this - after all, I know about the server,
not the laptop :-)

 ...

Thinking about how to extend the appeal (and long term viability!) of
sugar activities, one thing that appears as a clear opportunity is to
create a wrapper that allows to run sugar activities in a conventional
gnome/kde/xfce/awesome desktop.

It could open a regular window (instead of the root window), and
mimick the minimal set of Sugar facilities that activities depend on.
Perhaps a thinner, lighter set of classes providing the sugar api (add
the path to these "shim" libraries early in the python path to mask
the "full blown" sugar libs).

Right now, if I install on ubuntu sugar-activities, I get turteart,
but I can only use it inside sugar-emulator. If we had such a shim so
that

  $ sugar-wrapper turtleart

would start turtleart in a regular window, then that command can be
given an icon in my gnome menu, kde's kickstart menu, etc.

Of course there are some hard things

 - clipboard support probably needs glue
 - journal behaviour - though it might be relatively simple
 - naming documents that the user hasn't named explicitly
 - the initial steps of sharing a collaborative activity
(announcement, invites, etc)

but if it's within reach, it can be worthwhile.

thoughts? bricks?

cheers,




m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
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