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$100 Laptop Platform Moves On
The BBC is reporting that Sugar Labs is planning on taking "Sugar," the XO laptop's innovative interface, to the next level and distribute to a broader audience. "Sugar is a user interface that allows children to collaborate even when working on different machines. For example, they can write documents or make music together. The open source software also contains a journal and automatically saves and backs up all data. [...] Sugar Labs will work closely with developers from the open source community to develop the user interface for other computers and operating systems. It has already been bundled with the most recent releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux operating systems."
Love that they a)wanna focus on usability b)are still keeping to the project aims c)recognizing that people will happily use sugar on anything if it's good. I think sugar is adorable, wanna throw it on my laptop when I babysit, so I think this could be a good teaching tool. One interface with clicky pictures is easier to work with when teaching, even if there are all sorts of games separately-look at the whole jumpstart line of games. So I'm really psyched, though it'd be nice to have a live usb/live cd version.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Doesn't Windows run on the OLPC? I don't get this. I take this more as "We're abandoning Sugar because it sucks".
I just fired up my Kubuntu 8.04 system and, looking through the available packages from the Ubuntu repositories, I can find no trace of it. I tried various searches - sugar,olpc etc - but nothing. Can anyone discover the alleged bundled sugar interface?
I have run it in VMs in the past, but would have liked to have another fiddle with it.
Awful UID - but I have been here ages...
I was under the impression that this was more of a voluntarily, albeit unwanted, exodus from OLPC by the devs who actually care about Sugar
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The Asus Eee was quite successful and so were the Linksys wrt54/wrt54gl routers. We know the reason those units sell like wild fire. What I'm wondering is why Google didn't initiate a project like this? They have the money to resist being taken down before their product reaches the market.
I realize this design is trying to be as universal as possible but I think they missed the mark and made it somewhat difficult to use. Oh and be sure to watch the kids struggle to open it the first time they get their hands on it. Finally for web browsing it is just really slow, painful if you've surfed the net on a PC less than 8 years old.
I like the idea of OLPC, I like the hardware, but as someone who has used pretty much every OS out there I personally just didn't grove with the OS. I hope that the intended audience feels differently.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I know I got modded down, but my experience has been that most of the people that like Sugar have never used it. Nor do I understand the attack on Microsoft. If MS is willing to provide an operating system with more functionality (better foreign language support strikes me as a big deal) at low cost ($3 is pretty cheap), why is this "bad" other than Linux fanboyism? Why hasn't Redhat, Novell, Canonical, etc. stepped up with a Linux distribution?
Having spent a considerable amount of time with Sugar, I've come to the sad conclusion that Sugar is the weakest part of the entire OLPC project.
I'm ecumenical when it comes to operating systems and user interfaces. I use Sugar, Macintosh, Windows (both XP and Vista), Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu, Nokia IT OS (Debian variant), and iPod Touch on a daily basis; plus a couple of others on a less-frequent basis. I'm pretty well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these platforms. I have my preferences, but am no fanboy.
Sugar's interface fails on a number of points. It is very reminiscent of the old MIT interfaces of the 1970s where hackers built what looked good to them with little/no effort to have a professional designer tell them what to do (much less say "no" to bad UI issues).
The icons and graphical elements are poorly considered, and design decisions seem to be based more on "be different from anything else" than what makes sense. Typical are the icons for "Erase" and "Resume" in the Journal; these icons look like "do not enter" and "stop".
The use of color is quite poor; most of the Sugar interface is monochrome except for the little user indicator, which you can almost, but not quite, make look like what is on the lid of the XO if you do scary stuff at the UNIX shell level. The activity icons in the main interface have the same two additional colors.
Now, if they had any sense, the little user indicator would graphically match what is on the lid (presumably keyed by serial number) without impacting other icons. Even if they're limited in the main color palette (e.g., due to power considerations) they could have done that.
The actual activity icons are terrible. Some are alright (e.g., Browse and Write), but others are bizarre:
A comic strip balloon for Chat.
A snake for the Python development application (cutely called "Pippy").
The RSS application has a common RSS icon, but it's called News Reader. I can't imagine how a kid with no prior computer experience would interpret it.
Acoustic Tape Measure is an activity to measure distance between two OLPCs using sound. A cute toy, but the icons is a dolphin with sound coming out of its snout.
Additional things wrong with Sugar:
As noted about, many of the activity names are silly or simply bizarre.
There are four music activities: TamTamJam, TamTamEdit, TamTamSynthLab, and TamTamMini. These should be consolidated into a single Music activity.
There's a toy oscilloscope. OK, kids like talking into a microphone and seeing his voice show up as waves. We all remember going to the science museum as little kids and doing that. But this application is called Measure, which implies something quite a bit different.
Memorize is a sample game. Games ought to be under a general fun-and-games category.
The Terminal emulator and Log Viewer both ought to be under an advanced mode. Not necessarily hidden, but from the main activity it should be a something that indicates that you're getting into the internals (perhaps a screwdriver and pliers as an icon) and not pedagogical work.
Speaking of the log viewer, there's a lot of scary error messages in the logs suggesting that the software isn't very well debugged.
Then there is what is missing. Since the focus seems to be for education, the paucity of bundled references and the assumption that you can get what's missing from the Internet is astonishing. What is bundled seems to reflect the interests of the OLPC developers rather than pedagogical purposes.
The mouse control is idiotic and annoying (to put it mildly). In many of the activities, controls are near the edges of the screen, but if you put the pointer too near the edge Sugar takes over and you have to move the pointer back and wait.
There is no consistency in controls between activities. Every activity does things its own way, based apparently upon the individual programmer's preference. Sheesh, this is the sa
Do you honestly think that they are going to support a discount platform with security updates and bugfixes to an operating system that has been earmarked for extinction? The plan is to trap people into the vicious cycle of OS dependence, not liberate them. Linux can do anything XP can do and probably more given $100.00 hardware.
Just callin' it like I see it.
[ As most of us know, Microsoft's behavior goes much further back than just this year, but this year has enough examples to make the point ]
... perhaps the embrace/extinguish protocol taken to a whole new, much more personal, level.
2008:
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to ensure passage of OOXML as a "standard", in many cases overriding overwhelming votes to the contrary to railroad the standard through a corrupt and now discredited process.
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to demand monopolist's products rather than free alternative (Sugar, OS X), railroading their OS onto what was an open, educational platform to which many had donated a great deal of time and money, subverting and discrediting the project.
Recently, Blender has received overtures from Microsoft on how they might "help the project". Anyone who dares mention Microsoft's behavior these last few months, particularly with the OOXML debacle, is labeled a Microsoft basher, hothead, etc., with Microsoft proponents then labeling themselves "cooler heads" which "prevail."
Interestingly, the historical points of Microsoft's behavior are never addressed, rebutted (though in their initial contact they did reference OOXML as an open standard of the type "to which [Microsoft] is moving"). It's a clever if disgusting ad-hominem attack, aimed to smear open source and free software supporters for daring to point out these kind of unethical and destructive behaviors.
It's been a bad week. I'm starting to worry about the future of free software and open source projects, and wonder how many are going to be approached in the way blender has, and how many Microsoft might quietly absorb, subvert and sabotage from within, etc. It is certainly a strategy to gain influence over the direction and priorities of free and open source software projects, and I worry if it might not be something more
We may find ourselves particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing in economically distressed times like these, where a chunk of money (or gratis software, or sponsorship) from a large corporation might appear to be the answer to a project's difficulties, to the point where we might not even notice the strings that come attached.
So, why would Negroponte take $3/license for Microsoft's OS over $0/license for OS X? For the same reason he dumped sugar--because it gets his product through the bureaucratic doors Microsoft paid to have shut in his face otherwise. The project has been subverted and made meaningless, just as the ISO standards process has been, just as other standards have been, which has been Microsoft's intention all along.
Expect to see some of the flagship free software and open source projects "engaged" in similar ways, with "sugar" (money/support) when they deem it appropriate, and with legal and bureaucratic sticks when bribery and embracing fail. This is just getting started, folks.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'd hate to be picky about something this minor; but, it is not $0. Microsoft does spend some money on logistics: Thier asinine authentication schemes, distributing the actual copies, and "convincing" certain high ranking people to use XP on the XO. That costs money.
Granted the total spread across the copies is probably less than $1 per $3 licence. But, it's not free. And, no, it does not invalidate your point. (Sometimes people think that because I contradict them that I must oppose them.)