Developer XO laptop loan or buy - Speakeasy project

[Chris Ball]

Hi Lester,

On Mon, Jun 11 2012, Lester Leong wrote:
> I think it could just be as easy as having a collection of multimedia
> and gamifying it. I thought of having a set of flashcards with audio -
> then many things could be done with that. Audio to picture matching.
> Finish the sentence. Multiplayer races. Pictures in a series to denote
> context, etc. It could just be that simple. Would be really trivial to
> implement as well. I even thought of implementing it as web served
> pages so that the whole thing could exist in website form - in remote
> locations without Internet, maybe the pages can be locally
> stored/hosted.

I like this idea, and I'm happy to see that you aren't trying to do too
much.  I think develping this as a set of webapps sounds like a fine
start -- it allows you to work on it more easily with other developers,
who don't share your platform, too.

> Anyway, the reason I would like an XO is because I'd like to get a
> feel for user interface, as well as the limitations of it, from the
> very beginning. It would help guide design immensely.

Did you know that it's easy to run OLPC's user interface, Sugar, on
non-OLPC laptops?  Here's a recent guide written by Simon Schampijer:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Activity_Development_Fedora17

There isn't much (if anything) of the user interface that's dependent on
the hardware; you can see it all by running Sugar locally too.

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>   <http://printf.net/>
One Laptop Per Child