[sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Martin Sevior]

On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 23:32 -0400, Brian Jordan wrote:
> The open source project Gobby also uses this sort of who-wrote-what
> text highlighting, SJ and I have recently (right before he left for
> Wikimania) been looking into getting similar functionality on the XO.
> Having this highlighting integrated with Write would be fantastic.
> 

OK Guys, I get the message :-) I'll look to see how this can be enabled
by default in the most UI-easy way possible.

In the meantime one can fudge this very simply by having each user agree
to use their own color for writing text.

ie Joe chooses "red", Alice choose "green", Sarah chooses "blue" etc.

When everyone is happy with the final document choose "select-all" and
change all colours to black. This will work immediately.

BTW people might interested in our new service:

http://abicollab.net

As an easy way to share and collaborate on document creation in a
scalable world-wide fashion. With this you can easily setup group
documents and work on them in real-time (just like Write does).

AbiWord-2.6.4 has the code to connect to this but it is not enabled by
default as we're still working on some final bug fixes. You'll have to
compile your own version by passing "--enable-abicollab
--with-abicollab-service-backend" to the configure stage when you
compile the plugins.

Here is my configure line for abiword-plugins (which includes my
favourite plugins).

./configure --with-abiword=../abiword-2.6 --prefix=/home/msevior/abidir
--disable-all --enable-abicollab --with-abicollab-service-backend
--enable-abimathview --enable-abicommand --enable-loadbindings
--enable-presentation --enable-OpenDocument

Cheers,

Martin

> Brian
> 
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Martin Sevior <martines at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 18:54 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior <martines at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> >> > On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
> >> >> I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple
> >> >> development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many
> >> >> other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of
> >> >> demand for this from the field?
> >> >>
> >> >> -walter
> >> >>
> >> >> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> >> >> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> >> >> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >> >> > Hash: SHA1
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Chris Ball wrote:
> >> >> > | Another useful feature would be for
> >> >> > | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does.
> >> >> > | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > See also #7447.  Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all.
> >> >> >
> >> >
> >> > Hi Folks,
> >> >        Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we
> >> > haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background
> >> > colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature
> >> > for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord
> >> > is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write.
> >> >
> >> > I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea
> >> > though. The document will quickly become a mess.  Though if the kids
> >> > want to do this they can.
> >> >
> >> > Cheers
> >> >
> >> > Martin
> >>
> >> It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a
> >> collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking,
> >> so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will?
> >>
> >
> > AbiWord has change tracking but my experience with it is that it is more
> > trouble than it's worth. That said, there is a bug in AbiWord-2.6.4 so
> > that if you turn change tracking on all changes in a collaborative
> > document are marked with the same colour. I'd better fix this so that
> > different users get different colours during a collaboration session.
> >
> > Is there some feedback from the field about how kids are finding
> > collaborative writing? Do they use it all?
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Martin
> >
> >
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