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Red Hat OLPC Design Choices

Sources: Red Hat's Sugar Design Review 2 and private chat w/ Chris Blizzard.

The design team at Red Hat has been exploring various design ideas for the OLPC, and I think many of these are still in flux, but this is what they seem to be driving towards as of late June 2006:

• focus on collaboration and sharing
• direct editing model
• no menu bars
• global presence pane (mockup)
• new visual style
• full screen apps
• window management via tabs at the top of the screen
• simple toolbars on the bottoms of the windows

Application to AbiWord

For AbiWord to conform to this vision, we should focus on the following things:

AbiCollab. Uwog and Msevoir have been doing amazing work on the realtime collaboration features for AbiWord. This jives perfectly with the sharing and collaboration aims of the OLPC design folks.

Auto-save. Documents should be automatically saved on close to give the impression of direct editing.

Distill menus and toolbars into one, simple bottom toolbar. This is going to be tough, but there are some ideas here and and here for how to do it.

Embedded chat. This could be a technical challenge, but I think it would work beautifully with !AbiCollab.