Feature roadmap/Easy "Sugarization"

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Feature subcategory Is part of::Category:Activity-related work
Requesters {{#arraymap:Wanda, David|,|x|Requested by::x}}
Requirements
  • Support for standard desktop applications in Sugar.
  • Better "legacy app" compatibility; this should allow us to run existing apps like firefox, pidgin, and gimp in a reasonable manner (CScott version).
  • Make it easy to sugarize third party applications. It should be trivial to take an existing application which runs on Fedora (or other Linux too?) and install and run it on the XO. The basic sugarization interface for that should be usable by a non-programmer. Not all sugar features need to be enabled (will define exact list if this gets to requirements definition stage). Additional sugar capability may require programming (e.g. collaboration). The goal is to allow deployments to use any state of the art application available in Linux/Fedora.
  • Secondarily, make it easy to do the same for web based applications (Google Gears, Picasa, etc.). tbd if this needs to include client side Java support.
  • Allow easy creation of content bundles out of PDFs and HTML (other?). Should be as easy for a non-programmer as that described above.
  • Must "work well" in Sugar. There may be some applications that work but don't use the journal (e.g. Scratch) and that may be acceptable. A definition of how well an activity works or a definition of "well sugarized" is needed. First comments on this are at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_activity_guidelines
  • Product management and Learning teams must come up with 5 - 10 applications which will be the first targets.
Specification
  • See related X-windows threads on devel (links and references appreciated). This may also impact datastore and other areas.
  • Replace matchbox window manager with XMonad, Metacity, awesome, etc. Should provide both 'full screen' mode and traditional 'tiled' mode.
  • Switch to standard freedesktop.org startup notification mechanism: <trac>5271</trac>
  • Implement freedesktop.org notifications mechanism for alerts (low battery, low disk space, available software update)
  • Refactor home/friends/mesh view as operations on root window, so they make sense in a multiwindow setup. (It's been suggested that looking at the xpenguins code is instructive for understanding how nautilus,etc arrange their root window.)
  • App launching & mimetypes via XDG mechanisms (thanks, erikg)
  • Support for .desktop files in the launcher list
  • Support startup-notification
  • Support standard application icons on the frame
  • See also thread by Scott: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020387.html
Owners {{#arraymap:Gregorio|,|x|Contact person::User:x}}
Priority Priority::2
Helps deployability? Helps deployability::no
Target for 9.1? Target for 9.1::no