Talk:Sugar design review 2
The graphics are very stylish and have an appealing colour scheme,
In the picture Sugar-private-chat-mockup.png it says the following.
quote
Oh, I forgot to mention that we need names for those characters, if you can think of anything.
end quote
Could you please say for which characters you need names please?
- A link from the news of 2006-06-11 may provide the answer!
Contents
Suggestions for names for the characters
Boy
Crane (named after the bird, so localizable everywhere)
Girl
Swan (named after the bird, so localizable everywhere)
- These names are not localizable everywhere for 3 reasons:
- Gender
- In many languages, these names will be either feminine or masculine which conflicts with the gender of the Child. For instance the Russian word for Swan is masculine gender.
- Culture
- In many cultures, specific characteristics are associated with specific animals. The animal names that you suggest, or other animal names, may have negative characteristics in some cultures.
- Ecology
- Cranes and Swans are not necessarily found in every ecological niche on the planet. They may be totally unknown to some kids. For that matter, the names might both translate to the same word meaning big-foreign-bird
- May I suggest Japanese names since the OLPC will likely never be deployed in Japan. Therefore these will appear to be foreign-sounding or Japanese-sounding names. Japanese girls names usually end in -ko so something like Miko and Yoshi would work. Or Gecko and Sushi...
In Presence.png, the Mockup of what the presence pane might look like, what are the two graphics with the arrows in the Everyone section intended to symbolize please?
I thought the laptop will be used primarily in black & white. I guess that is not considered important at this mockup stage?
From Alan Kay Two things to really think hard about:
a - tiny screen real estate b - need for children to construct with images and programs
(a) A good ploy would be to have the first UI that the kid sees have lots of obvious buttons to push. But when the kids start to make their own content, especially dynamic content, they will want every pixel (and the designers need to figure out how to make them available). This is a tricky design task but very necessary.
(b) communication and community are good things, but two of the most important things that the children need to learn (regardless of whether their governments think so) are mathematics and science. The children need to be able to construct simulations of all kinds of ideas and speculations. Both the simulations and the UIs used to help construct them take a lot of screen real estate. Doing this well is probably the most difficult and important UI design task for the HDLT.
UI is User Interface
- If you have a look at Squeak's UI, you see that it does deal with the issue of letting the user get at the whole screen for their own UI. The same is true of most game programs even those running under Windows.
HDLT means ?
- This is Alan Kay's personal acronym meaning Hundred Dollar Lap Top. So far it hasn't caught on elsewhere.
Do you think that 600mhz cpu with slow gpu can make it?
- Strange question. Are you aware that this is an educational project and not a laptop project?
Anything to learn from Groupkit?
Have you looked at Groupkit to see if you can make use of any of their backend code? They implemented something called Teamwave with their groupware comms library that had similar features to what you describe as "shared documents".
You don't explicitly say it, but when you described the type of documents that would be shared, it sounded like XML/SVG/HTML. Is this correct?
Here is an idea for naming and finding shared documents. First of all, the names should be Unicode strings, i.e. matching Python's "\w" Unicode regular expression. There is no other structure to the name.
Let's start by assuming that there are many possible namespaces in which the name could exist. On the user's laptop, there will their own namespace. Each buddy also has a namespace. Some of these buddies may have published a portion of their namespace so that you can find the name, even if they are not currently in wifi range. And then there are the special buddies known as teachers, librarians or just plain servers.
If you search these namespaces successively, rather like the way Hypercard searches its message path, then you can either pick the first hit, or provide the user with a list of possible hits.
Rather than viewing this as simply searching folders for filenames, it is better to explicitly recognize that these are namespaces. At some point in time, there will be a need to name things that are not simply files. For instance, a buddy name would refer to someone's identity information in the buddy list that you want to share with a friend. Then, when that friend travels to the next village, this buddy will pop up on their laptop when they are in range. Similarly, applications could be named, and thus shared, even though an application may reside in many files. Or database records may be named so that a record can be shared without sharing the entire databse. For instance, an appointments database record or an email message.
The above is a good idea.
Would it also be a good idea to say that each file name consists of two Unicode strings, namely the name itself and an accompanying tag string. Then everything would work as suggested above and in addition the tags could be displayed as well, and processed in some circumstances.
> Similarly, applications could be named, and thus shared, even though an application may reside in many files.
With the tag facility, the names of the files for an application could all be the same with the tag used for either the name of the individual file or for something like 2 of 17 or for a combination of those two possibilities: the tag idea could also be used for chapters of a book or units of course material.
How would the Unicode string be terminated? Some software systems use a null character. Would a RETURN character be a better idea? Or maybe one of the other Unicode control characters?
