[Techteam] Weekend Report - due today

[Gary C Martin]

On 3 Sep 2008, at 13:36, Greg Smith wrote:

> Cmap tools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) is a client server application that
> appears to have pretty good traction in schools, mostly in South
> America. We have a request to make it work on the XO. I exchanged some
> e-mails with Alberto Canas (con enye) who is the main application  
> owner.

...

> The first point seems solvable if they just install Java afterwards.
> Then we don't need to worry about licenses. Its a big install but
> probably not a deal breaker. The performance may be challenging but
> again I think we can make it fit.
>
> The second point is a tougher problem. Alberto thinks they could
> re-write the application to work with tiled windows so they all fit on
> the XO. The other idea I have heard is that we could run an activity
> which is X-Windows. Then you could launch this activity within that  
> one.
> That may affect performance and would need testing. For the first idea
> of rebuilding the Cmap tools for sugar, we would need engineers to  
> work
> on that which brings me to the third point.
>
> I'm not sure what free but not open source means. I think it means  
> that
> we can not take a snapshot of their code and fork it nor can we modify
> it and push it back to them. We need to find a way for Alberto to hire
> more engineers if we want them to improve the implementation for the  
> XO.
>
> The only good idea so far is the X-windows in Sugar idea.
>
> I'm open to other suggestions on this. Questions and comments  
> welcome too.
>
> I know of one opportunity in Latin America which is being held up by
> this. There may be more in the future, we'll see. The pedagogical
> specialists here tell me that concept maps are pretty hot in education
> right now. They also pointed me to a commercial tool which some  
> schools
> use: http://www.inspirationsoftware.com/
>
> Does anyone know of an open source solution in this area?

I'm a bit of a mindmapper/diagrammer type. If you're looking for free  
and Open Source you want to look at freemind. It's very competitive vs  
the commercial mapping tools and also supports a number of external  
file formats, it's another Java app so would need that extra install.

	http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

The other tool worth a poke is the more general purpose graphviz, also  
free and Open Source, it's command line but there are some GUI's out  
there also. Could be a very nice Activity to wrap a simple GTK GUI  
around the tool chain:

	http://www.graphviz.org/

Also want to point you to the Model activity if you've not tried it.  
It's rough and incomplete at my last testing, but seems to be a  
potentially interesting diagramming tool. The wiki talks of "easily  
sketch and simulate system dynamics models" which seemed a pretty  
scary opening paragraph – I'd be happy with just a good diagramming  
tool :-) Dev work seems to have gone quiet :-(

	http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Model

> If the customers want cmap tools, my first choice is to make that  
> work.
> That's what I'm focusing on right now albeit lower priority than
> shipping 8.2 :-).

--Gary