Collaboration Central

The currency of this article or section may be limited by out-of-date information. There may be relevant discussion on its talk page

Introduction

Presence
Mesh View

One of OLPC's core principles is Connection:

"The children in the neighborhood are thus permanently connected to chat, share information on the web, gather by videoconference, make music together, edit texts, read e-books and enjoy the use of collaborative games on line."

Sugar provides a collaboration framework for activities, which provides presence and data sharing.

This page is your guide to the state of Collaborative Activities on Sugar: developing them, using APIs and techniques, and assisting others in the development community.

Collaboration News

Announce new collaborative activities, new collaborative features in existing activities, or platform improvements for collaboration here.

• Useful debugging tools at Network Resources
• Video Chat updated and working again! See [1] for required RPMs.
• HelloMesh code updated, to send text entered in a gtk.Entry over the Tube, and use alerts to show what happens - Release 3
• Cerebro (a scalable, light-weight platform that provides presence information, efficient file sharing and an easy collaboration mechanism for activities) released: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012944.html
• Presence Service API improved: Update.1 provides an improvement in the creation of Telepathy channels, allowing for the removal of some of the boilerplate code previously required for activities.
• Pippy gains simple collaboration: As of Pippy-20, joining a shared session gives you the contents of the owner's source buffer.
• Upcoming IRC meeting on collaboration: Sugar dev meeting#Thursday April 17 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Collaborative Activities

These activities have collaborative features:

Activity	Status	Comment
Browse	Shares bookmarks
Read	Shares PDF	Some sharing reliability issues
Write	abicollab sharing	Has a hub (Master) and spoke network topology which only works while the original sharer is in the shared activity. Marc Maurer (uwog) has ideas on how to hand over the Master ownership for our web service backend. Feel free get in touch with him if you'd like to help out getting this to work on the telepathy/tubes backend.
Chat	XMPP IM chat	Uses Telepathy text channel, not Tubes, currently only works for a MUC, not 1-1 chats
Record	Shares photos, video, audio
Pippy	Shares source buffer at time of joining
TamTam	TamTam jam shares a drumbeat across the network
Etoys	Etoys has many modes of collaboration, including shared objects, shared desktop, push-to-talk, etc.
Calculate	Calculate shares variables over the network
Stopwatch	shares timers over the network
Measure	shares data streams over the network
Distance	uses network (and audio) to determine the distance between two laptops
Connect	two player game over the network	Collabora's original implementation of Tubes; needs extensions to activity API to finish functionality
Memorize	multiplayer memory game also allows sharing of user-created games over the network
Poll Builder	Simple polls with sharing
Joke Machine	Share jokes
Jigsaw Puzzle
Slider Puzzle
Video Chat	Video/Voice chat between two participants	Needs integration with mesh view, needs RPMs
StarChart	No collaboration yet	sharing of coordinate and time settings is planned

Please add your own activities!

Developer Resources

• Tutorials:

• Collaboration Tutorial
• dbus-python tutorial

• HowTos:

• Designing your activity's D-Bus Tubes API

• Example activity: HelloMesh
• Developers manual
• Mailing list: sugar mailing list

Help Wanted / Offered

• If you need help with implementing collaboration, come to #sugar on IRC and talk to me. --morgs 08:32, 14 April 2008 (EDT)
• The Connect activity needs finishing. Patches welcome! --morgs 08:32, 14 April 2008 (EDT)

Meetings

• The Sugar developer meetings are a good opportunity to discuss collaboration needs and issues. Upcoming meetings are announced on the sugar mailing list.