“The first One Laptop Per Child hardware devices are still months from deployment, but you can sneak a peek at their Sugar desktop environment and bundled applications by running an OS image under an emulator. It’s a great way to finally get some hands-on time with this long-anticipated project, even though it’s not perfect.”
… for the life of me, I simply don’t like that interface. I have tried to like it,honestly,played in VMWare, I can’t get used with it.
I’m downloading VMPlayer and the img as I type this… I’ve watched the videos of the GUI.. I did not like it at all. but, whatever, I won’t be using the device. Even if I could get a blackmarket unit
Looks like something from fisherprice..
Looks like something from fisherprice..
That was kind of the point – something kids might like but that adults wouldn’t, to keep people from stealing and selling them on the black market.
> Looks like something from fisherprice..
“Critics have claimed that the default Windows XP user interface (Luna) adds visual clutter and wastes screen space while offering no new functionality and running more slowly – with some even calling it ‘the Fisher-Price interface’.”
“Windows XP was first released on October 25, 2001, and as of 2006 is the most recent consumer version of Microsoft Windows available to the general public, with over 400 million copies in use, according to an estimate by an IDC analyst.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
—
So is the Fisher Price comment against it, or for it?
firmly against it
I despise Luna. Anytime I use an XP computer I turn off the themes…
Hi:
The OLPCs are going to be used by children… I like the idea to introduce them to the computer science world, but… why do not give them the real thing? some real OS with a real GUI? they are children: they can learn everything faster and better than we can!!!
This remembers me to the LOGO LANGUAGE, designed for children… I do not know if it has been successful, but a lot of children did prefer learning to program in BASIC, PASCAL and C and they are programming geniuses today now.
Edited 2006-12-06 01:13
ebasconp: “I like the idea to introduce them to the computer science world”
Teaching users CS isn’t the point of OLPC (seems to be a fairly common misconception amongst geeks). It’s a general-purpose learning tool, not a bootcamp for the next generation of Office 2007 operators.
“why do not give them the real thing? some real OS with a real GUI?”
It is a real OS with a real GUI. I assume you mean a bog=standard Mac/Linux/Windows OS distribution. Three problems with this:
1. Modern mainstream OSes and accompanying applications are written for modern mainstream PC hardware, and while the OLPC hardware may be modern (and actually rather sophisticated) it is hardly mainstream, particularly in terms of raw capacity. That really limits the options to niche distributions like Damn Small Linux created specifically for resource-constrained hardware, or a purpose-built solution as they’ve gone for here.
2. The OLPC position seems to be that the computer should be a means to an end, not the end in itself. All the modern mainstream OSes come a ton of conceptual and logistical baggage. Sure kids could learn all that cruft if they had to, but that’s all time they could have better spent on learning reading and writing, math, history, geography, art, music, etc, etc, etc instead.
3. One of the OLPC’s most important features is its omnipresent collaboration support. None of the modern mainstream OSes are nearly as advanced in this area, and building in collaboration support from the get-go will almost certainly produce a much better result than trying to retrofit it to existing stock products that weren’t designed for it.
(Also see the comments to Thom’s recent http://osnews.com/story.php/16582/The-OLPC-Sugar-Interface-Dont-Do-… post.)
“but a lot of children were learning BASIC, PASCAL and C and they are programming geniuses today”
And many, many more children are not. The OLPC is an everyman’s tool, not the exclusive preserve of a select minority. It has to provide something of value for everyone, whether they’re destined to become the next future Linus Torvalds, Marie Curie, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mother Theresa, or Everyday Jo(e).
Thank you for getting it right.
The real purpose of these machines are to give kids free personal access to knowledge. If they want to learn how to be programmers so be it, but if they want to learn to become at whatever it is that interests them so be it too.
As for the garbage about them needing to learn modern User Interfaces, where did the idea that 10-15 years from now we will still be using present day designs is beyond me. The computers I used ten(10) years ago did not have today’s interface characteristics, just like they were not like the ones twenty(20) years ago or thirty (30) years ago. And I am not even sure the toys I played with almost thirty-five years (35) ago could even be claimed to have interfaces.
Hardwired Logic => Front Panel Switches => Interperted Basic => The first public GUIs => Present Day GUIs => ??????? and people still expect the interfaces will not change by the time these kids grow up?
Edited 2006-12-06 06:24
We played with different toys, you and I. 20 years ago I had an SGI IRIS with a user interface not at unlike today’s sitting next to my beige mac.
The idea that user interfaces won’t be much different 15 years from now stems from an understanding of how technology evolves. Almost every realistic UI was attempted as early as 40 years ago, and the 40 years in between has shaken out the weak ones. This is not much different than the automobile UI converging to a small set of pedals, a shift lever, a stearing wheel and a starter key, only applied to a more flexible tool.
35 years ago would have been 1971. In 1971, Plato was eight years old and about to become the downfall of William Norris and CDC. Plato is a cautionary tale of hubris for those who think they are building “knowledge machines” or “teaching machines”, and one can see many of Norris’ mistakes echoed in the OLPC project.
Andrew Carnegie long ago figured out how to give kids “free personal access to knowledge” and went out and build the Carnegie libraries. It would be nice to think that OLPC will be the electronic equivalent of that, but it’s far more likely to be another Plato.
I think the general stagnation in UI development stems from conservatism, rather than the notion that everything has been tried already.
Personally I don’t believe that every realistic UI was attempted 40 years ago. Additionally many ideas that have been tried before were not practical because of hardware (and software) limitations that no longer exist.
Take pen-based computing. There were no serious attempts at building pen-based UIs 40 years ago – most of those efforts date within the last 20 years. In my opinion the best pen-based UI was Apple’s Newton. No other pen-based UI before or since has reached its level of intuitiveness or ease of use.
The reasons for the Newtons failure do not stem from the UI or OS, but rather because the hardware was slightly too large, and because it wasn’t given the chance to succeed. (The Newton division was reported to be profitable when Steve Jobs pulled Newton Inc. back into Apple and killed it.) IMHO it cannot be argued that it was a weak UI that has been “shaken out”.
I believe that there’s a lot of scope for change in computer UI, and that many ideas have only recently explored. Take multi-touch user interfaces, for example. Watch the video on this page to see the kind of UI possibilities that exist with this technology:
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
Hardware is important to UI. The new controller that Nintendo developed for the Wii allows for different UIs to games that were not possible/practical before, and we are starting to see console games change as a result. Arguably Apple is the only personal computer company in a position to make similar UI advances since they too make the whole widget.
Whilst it is true that the UIs that we use today are not all that much different from the UIs we’ve been using for the last 20 years that is largely because we haven’t changed the tools we use to interact with our computers. There is also an inherent conservatism in business whereby we maintain compatibility with older software, which puts limits on how much progress can be made.
Sugar is a work in progress. It remains to be seen quite how successful it will be.
Personally I don’t believe that every realistic UI was attempted 40 years ago.
Neither do I, which is why I said almost every.
I disagree that the Newton was the best pen paced UI. I think that the Xerox stroke alphabet, “borrowed” by Palm for Graphiti was a better approach to pen based. I note that it isn’t all that popular, or effective.
Multitouch is just another variant of gesture interface, and those have been around since the 60s. I think there’s even a video floating around of Englebart doing something gesture based with a digitizer. The research you’re pointing to merely sticks the digitizer on the display surface.
Your comment about inherent conservatism is a feature of all technologies. Early innovation eventually gives way to commonality which leads to entrenchment which sets a very high barrier for change. A new UI has to be significantly better than existing ones to even stand a chance against them.
Suger is a clone of an old GUI that was used in some CAD programs. I suspect it’s an accidental clone, as those tools never became all that popular. I also supsect that it won’t do all that well for the same reasons they failed to gain acceptance.
As for the garbage about them needing to learn modern User Interfaces, where did the idea that 10-15 years from now we will still be using present day designs is beyond me. The computers I used ten(10) years ago did not have today’s interface characteristics, just like they were not like the ones twenty(20) years ago or thirty (30) years ago. And I am not even sure the toys I played with almost thirty-five years (35) ago could even be claimed to have interfaces.
For me:
35 years ago ASR33 teletype to PDP10
30 years ago Tek 4010 to (DEC RT-11 on PDP11)
25 years ago CP/M on z80
20 years ago DOS on 8080
15 years ago X11(TWM) on BSD
10 years ago Win 95
5 years ago GNOME 1.x on RH
Today Ubuntu
Evolution
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q=node/47
Why do they make a OS that looks like nothing else in the OS world? It’s way to over-simplified.
Children of the 3rd world are not stupid, they are uneducated!
How will they be able to use a normal computer after using this one? They would have to learn it all over again.
Why do they make a OS that looks like nothing else in the OS world? It’s way to over-simplified.
Performance, most likely. It saves memory not to have to store a backbuffer for every window in case you want to move that window.
Didn’ t you hear latest OLPC news…
Nick is talking to his pant buddy Bill to put Windows GUI (most probably Win 3.1) on OLPC.
Please no more GUI discussions till we get official comments about Nick and Bill one-to-one talks!!!
The problem with this UI is that it seems that it was designed by coders and PROGRAMMERS, instead of specialist DESIGNERS.
You can tell just by looking at it. It seems very amateur and I don’t think it is a good design at all.
Compare it to something like Symbian Techview, which is usable on the same sort of screen sizes, and it seems quite poor.
If you are going to spend millions on R & D and hardware design, why not spend a little bit more and hire some professionals who know what they’re doing.