OLPC XO-3 on slashdot front page right now

[Walter Bender]

On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 1:15 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 11:46 PM, Alexandro Colorado <acolorado at gmail.com> wrote:
>> We talked about it on the IRC chat, however there is a lot of
>> missconceptions like the crank meme, and now andorid.
>>
>> Why would we want a >13yr old kid in 3rd world to go to the android
>> store to buy apps, get a google account and use G+.
>>
>> Just doesnt seem right.
>
>
> Please consider the very pragmatic argument that one *really* good
> reason to have Android on the demo of the XO-3 tablet at an event as
> well publicized as CES is that neither Sugar or Gnome have yet
> implemented all that neat touch-interface, tablet stuff like virtual
> keyboards, etc. whereas all of this has been present in Android for
> some time.

I agree with your "pragmatic argument", but... I am almost certain
that what is being demoed on the XO-3.0 at CES is in fact Sugar
running on Fedora. And it works pretty well. (OLPC did some tweaking
for the demo.) That doesn't mean there isn't lots more work to be done
(one of the reasons (as you note below) that we are pushing hard on
GTK-3, since the GNOME community is also working in this problem
space). There is a virtual keyboard for Sugar (but not in the build
being demoed at CES) and not integrated to the point it needs be...
but I did, for example, make a modification to Turtle Art for CES so
that number blocks can be changes w/o a keyboard.

>
> Demo'ing Sugar on the tablet at this point would probably require
> plugging in a keyboard and a mouse, which would be a little
> embarrassing in front of all of the press corps.

Nope. Just need to avoid a few widgets and activities that require typing.

>
> I'm fairly sure that Sugar and most likely Gnome will have tablet
> support in time for a production XO-3.0, but it is a bit much to
> expect all of that to be in place right now when they are showing the
> earliest of hardware prototypes.  I would guess that one reason why a
> small number of "extra-special" XO-1.75 prototypes had touch screens
> installed was to initiate work on tablet support for XO-3.0, but that
> would be speculation on my part.
>
> I think the level of speculation around Android is all out of
> proportion to it's real significance, but if you are really worried,
> you should port Angry Birds to Sugar so that the scales are balanced.
>
> cjl
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regards.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org