State of the Code
My official time is up for Google’s Summer of Code. I didn’t get as far as I would have liked, but I think I made a good start, and I had a hell of a summer.
Design
What’s been done…
A decent bit of user research: writeup of related projects in history, who are the users?, education in Brasil, and education in Nigeria.
A big part of making Abi work well on the OLPC is making it mesh well with the design work being done at Red Hat. I’ve documented their vision as I understand it and how it applies to AbiWord here.
Part of making Abi simpler so it can fit Red Hat’s vision is paring down the functionality. I did an inventory of Abi’s features and their relevance in an OLPC context.
Many sketches have been created.
What’s left to do…
The big hole in the design process is evaluation and iteration. I didn’t do a very good job finding kids to help me evaluate Abi on OLPC (I had only one lead, and it fell through), so I haven’t done any evaluation yet. This has been especially hard because I’ve been travelling around so much this summer.
When I get to San Diego (next week) I will start looking for some kids to try AbiWord out so we can get some real feedback. And from there we’ll be able to do some real iteration which will help fix the massive problems my design undoubtedly has.
Implementation
What’s been done…
- AbiWord runs in the sugar shell
- It has a minimal interface with a custom toolbar
- I implemented a new clipart toolbar that lets kids drag and drop pictures into their documents
What’s left to do…
- Polish (make clipart bar look nicer, have it look for clipart somewhere intelligent)
- Finish implementing table menu button
- Integrate AbiCollab with Sugar shell
- Use clipart bar to add drawings drawing app
Documentation
I’ve dumped a lot of documentation on my wiki and my Summer of Code blog, but I think there would be some value in writing up more polished, complete guides to both designing UI for Sugar and getting software to work with it. The Red Hat folks are already working on some of this, but I could certainly contribute.
So, that’s that
My #1 goal for Summer of Code was to start building relationships with people in the Free Software world and get started hacking, and I absolutely accomplished that.
So this is both a retrospective and a look to the future. There’s more to be done to get AbiWord onto the OLPC, and I intend to keep contributing to the effort.
But for the next few days at least, I’ll stick to enjoying the American West.
September 5th, 2006 at 10:40 am
A lot of good work and many interesting thoughts that I have a few comments and questions to.
From http://snowedin.net/ideas/AbiWord+OLPC+Feature+Inventory
“Paragraph tools (center, justify, columns, directionality) These are important document formatting and organization tools. But I’m not sure they have much educational benefit. Directionality is certainly going to be an issue for some countries.”
Shouldn’t Abi just automatically take care of using the right directionality based on the locale?
What is the plan for features that doesn’t make it to the menu bar, are they completely disabled or accessible through a second level interface?
With regard to the clipart pane I’m a little sceptical on how well the simple selection box scales when having, say 100 or 1000 items. It seems obvious to include a lot of pictures on the OLPC.
Also, could you enlighten me on why all mockups (your’s as well as other’s) are in 640×480 when http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification talks about a 1200×900 screen?
September 5th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
Nice job on the SoC! Congrats on a well spent summer. :-)
If you’re looking for kids in SD, check out the on-campus daycare at UCSD. I think you’re allowed to use the kids for experiments, but you might want to look into IRB stuff first. Otherwise, you could stand outside Sea World or Legoland and ask for volunteers…
If all else fails, let me know. I have some friends of friends with kids that I can get a hold of, most likely. Good luck!
September 6th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Simon,
Regarding directionality, yes, it should work. I was just noting for myself that it is something that should be remembered during the design process.
And there are no plans for a second level interface. There probably won’t be one initially at least.
You’re absolutely right about the clipart pane scaleability.
And the screenshots are 640×480 because that is the effective resolution of the screen in color mode. To use the full resolution you need to be in grayscale mode.
January 19th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Every creature needs to rest. Giraffes, little babies, elephants, dogs, cats, kids, koala bears, grandparents, moms, dads, and hippos in the jungle - they all sleep! Just like eating, sleep is necessary for survival. WBR LeoP