<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/6/08, <b class="gmail_sendername">Neil Graham</b> <<a href="mailto:lerc@screamingduck.com">lerc@screamingduck.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">On Wednesday 06 August 2008 7:08:33 am Alex Levenson wrote:<br>> I'm announcing x2o's first tentative release! x2o is a physics problem<br>
> solving game in which you create Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to get<br>> the O to land on top of the X. Check it out at<br>> <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o</a>, give it a try, write some levels, and let me<br>
> know how it goes. There are a lot of planned improvements on the way, but I<br>> would love some feedback.<br><br>I have been playing a lot of <a href="http://fantasticcontraption.com/">http://fantasticcontraption.com/</a> lately so this<br>
is something I'm quite keen on.<br><br>Some things... [rant prep.]<br><br>Searching for X2o using the wiki search doesn't find it. It's Called X2o!<br>it's url is <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o</a> for heaven's sake! Somebody either<br>
fix the search or just change the search box to go to google.<br><br>With regards to using activities on the XO I've tried to be accepting of the<br>sugar interface style, but this activity crystallizes things for me. I'm now<br>
prepared to move to the sugar-sucks camp. I've used many and written a few<br>physics toy programs. I've had a fair experience with a variety of ways to do<br>this kind of thing. X2o is the most cubersome that I have encountered.<br>
<br>I'd like to be clear that I don't think there is anything done poorly in the<br>X2o activity itself. I think it all comes from having the sugar interface.<br>The more I encounter sugar interfaced programs, the more I think Activities<br>
would be better off with just about anything else.<br><br>I gave myself a long time to acclimatise, much longer than I would have for<br>anything else, because the XO is really quite important. I really believe in<br>the goals of the OLPC project, but I cant use the XO effectively! My daughter<br>
can't use the XO effectively!<br><br>At what point does a do-over make more sense? I was prepared to take the<br>resource usage and the slow bits and the joke that is the journal because<br>they were all things that future work would have addressed. The cumbersome<br>
user interface is a killer though because it's designed to be like that.<br><br>When I got my XO it was as an XO, not as a cheapie laptop. I wanted to<br>support the platform. A big part of that for me was dogfooding, but it has<br>
bought me nothing but frustration.<br><br>There are some good things there. The activity security and the collaboration<br>support are good ideas, I can't help feeling that those bits should be kept<br>and the rest done from scratch.<br>
<br>Sorry if this post irritates some of you. I'm not usually a mailing list<br>ranter, but the olpc project is something that I think is really quite<br>important for the world.<br></blockquote></div>
<div>Neil,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I love a good rant just like the next guy but you don't mention any specifics about which aspects of Sugar bother you so much.<br> </div>
<div>If anyone were to go ahead with that do-over you're suggesting, what should be changed?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Thanks,</div>
<div>Christoph<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Christoph Derndorfer<br>co-editor, olpcnews<br>url: <a href="http://www.olpcnews.com">www.olpcnews.com</a><br>e-mail: <a href="mailto:christoph@olpcnews.com">christoph@olpcnews.com</a> </div>