[sugar] G1G1v2 Activities

[david at lang.hm]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, pgf at laptop.org wrote:

> benjamin m. schwartz wrote:
> > Chris Ball wrote:
> > | So, we shipped 19 activities with G1G1v1; that means the ten activities
> > | people vote for here are likely to be a subset of that list, and we
> > | aren't learning much about what new things we should include.  People
> > | replying might decide to give 20 suggestions instead of 10, or to omit
> > | original G1G1 activities from their list.
> > |
> >
> > Also, G1G1v1 shipped with the old Sugar interface, which made managing
> > large numbers of installed Activities very difficult.  By contrast, the
> > new Sugar UI means that we could easily ship 100 Activities, with only 15
> > starred by default.  Activities' average size on disk varies
> > substantially, but many simpler ones are only about 100 KB, compressed.
> > 100 Activities * 100 KB = 10 MB, or 1% of the disk.  Each additional
> > Activity provides more opportunity for exploration, and makes the
> > experience more enjoyable, so I would advocate for shipping as many as
> > possible.
>
> i disagree, to the extent that the activities appear on the laptop
> in a completely unorganized fashion -- there's no real notion of
> topic, or testedness, or age-appropriateness.  too many can make
> the prospect of exploring them overwhelming, especially given how
> long it takes to try them, and that most of the names bear almost
> no relation to the content.  i think it's better to ship a a good
> representative sample, and clear instructions (somewhere -- is it
> at least in a pre-loaded library page?) on how to explore and get
> more from our wiki.

isn't there an activity to manage activities? is there any way to order 
them so that this one shows up first?

If so, then I would say ship as close to everything as possible, with the 
idea that this management activity will help the user remove what they 
don't want easily.

not everyone who's playing around with an XO has network connectivity, 
which makes it _far_ easier to remove stuff that you don't care about then 
to add additional stuff in later.

I suspect that most of the G1G1 laptops out there are running the default 
set of activities.

Also, if you don't know what types of activities exist, you won't go 
looking for them. if you have lots of samples it's far easier to think of 
other similar things to look for.


In fact, thinking about this as I've been typing this message, I think it 
would be a _good_thing_ if there was an entry for every activity that's 
supported, even if all that the 'activity' consists of is a web page that 
shows what the activity is and has a link to download it (useful for 
activities that are otherwise too large or not appropriate for all ages)

David Lang