Talk:Application Developers
Overview
There are people in the OLPC management team and there are people working in the OLPC offices and laboratories and there are people working on the OLPC project as part of their employment at various companies and orgnaizations. There are people called interns working on the project over the summer.
There are also people around the world who are interested in the project and who would like to participate in developing applications to run on the laptop. Some of these people may be just making the attempt on home computers or maybe computers in public libraries and even internet cafés, doing the best they can with the equipment to which they happen to have access.
Remembering the concept of External Students of Universities and influenced by the Overwhelmed section of the Setting Up a Sugar Development Environment on Windows page, it seems reasonable to introduce the concept of External Developers. Thus facilities can be provided for External Developers, hopefully most of them by External Developers themselves.
The situation which started off this line of thinking, namely setting Up a Sugar Development Environment on Windows, could be a good example. Maybe External Developers could document step by step what is necessary to install the system on various types of PC, not necessarily the latest equipment.
Question 1
Could there be a web-accessed system so that people who can only use a PC in a public library or in an internet café can develop applications without needing to install anything on the local PC nor attach any USB device to it? Is that even feasible?
Question 2
Could someone who can use a PC in a public library or in an internet café develop applications without needing to install anything on the local PC if they are allowed to attach something to a USB port?
- In fact, yes this is possible but it does cost a small amount. For £5 (about $9.50) you can buy a Python distribution called Movable Python sometimes referred to as Python-on-a-stick because it runs from a USB stick memory device. For that matter it runs from any USB-powered storage device so it could even be installed on a 20gig Freecom drive. It can be customized by adding your own libraries so you could install GTK+, PyGTK and any other bits that you need.
- I haven't personally tried to run Movable Python together with PyGTK but if your GUI is simple then you can even develop using WAX or WxPython and then have someone port it to PyGTK later when you have a working product.
Language Training for Developers
All software must be translated to foreign languages and script. Most of the software developers don't know anything about languages with different writing systems. A learning software, that helps to learn some chinese, tibetian, thai,... words including script, could bring the nessessary knowledge to the developers.
The aim of this isn't to enable software developers to translate the software, but to give them knowledge about fonts and text input methods.
You can help us
Please use this page to develop the concept of External Developers and what facilities are needed.