A Brief Look at OLPC's SugarUI by RedHat
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 10th Apr 2007 22:00 UTC, submitted by michuk
Graphics, User Interfaces "Red Hat has recently shared with the world the first ISO images of the system that is supposed to be installed on the OLPC laptops. I suddenly felt an irresistible temptation. I downloaded 291 MB ISO, burned it on a CD and started testing. Here is what I got."
E-mail Print r 0   43 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/dmq
Thread beginning with comment 229358
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Lack of features
by petera on Tue 10th Apr 2007 22:22 UTC
petera
Member since:
2006-04-22

I agree with the main points of the little article, apart from the bit about installing KDE, that's just daft on such a low spec machine.

Tool tips should not be too hard to do (nice clunky semi-transparent ones should do the trick, and a simple file manager as well.

Reply Score: 1

RE: Lack of features
by shykid on Tue 10th Apr 2007 22:35 in reply to "Lack of features"
shykid Member since:
2007-02-22

I'm actually quite impressed with SugarUI--it's something radically different, and judging from screenshots, it should suit its target audience very well when it's finished.

I think a OLPC would run XFCE nicely. I could be completely wrong on that, but it is quite usable on an old 500 MHz Celeron running Xubuntu I have laying around.

If it winds up anything like the original BeOS, Haiku would probably be very snappy on a OLPC.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE: Lack of features
by butters on Wed 11th Apr 2007 04:26 in reply to "Lack of features"
butters Member since:
2005-07-08

I could be wildly incorrect, but my impression is that they tried to eliminate text as much as possible because either they don't expect a high level of literacy amongst the users and/or that internationalization would have been somewhere between arduous and impossible to accomplish across some parts of the developing world. I'm sure the kids are just as smart as in industrialized nations, but they might not be as capable of interacting with text-based interfaces. Once again, I might be drastically underestimating the literacy and language standardization in these parts of the world.

I wonder what constraints and guidance Red Hat's designers might have been given by social anthropologists and regional experts. I'd like to see a paper on the design considerations. In fact, I'd be fascinated to read an analysis of how the OLPC believes the target audience would likely use these computers.

The OLPC team has accomplished the glamorous yet relatively easy part of bringing their vision to reality: manufacturing a capable portable computer than can be sold for roughly $100. The hard part is making these devices useful. Thanks to FOSS, the software can evolve organically to meet the diverse needs of its users. I'm not convinced that SugarUI is the best seed for this process, but I'm not convinced that it isn't either. I think they need to introduce these into a few pilot communities and gauge the reaction.

Reply Parent Score: 3

Here you go
by brucecampbellite on Thu 12th Apr 2007 12:42 in reply to "RE: Lack of features"
brucecampbellite Member since:
2006-08-14