Last Blog

The Nutri activity is complete.  So far, there have been 15 downloads.  We've submitted our poster, and we're almost finished with our presentation. 

The activity we submitted is very simple.  Our goal with this project was mainly to walk through the whole process of creating and publishing a Sugar activity, not so much to have a great activity with lots of great features.  Now that it's been published, I'd like to continue working on it so that it can be a really neat and helpful activity.  Initially, I'd like to refactor the code a little and make it more readable for future updates.  (This will also help me to become more familiar with the Python and PyGTK that we used since I wasn't as involved in this part of the project as others on my team.)  I'd also like to update the GUI a bit.  I think that just a few simple changes will make it look more Sugar-ish and kid-friendly. 

Overall, this was a fun project, and it has been so exciting to see the Nutri activity up on the Sugar Activities site.  I do wish we had divided up the work for the project more effectively.  If we each had our own portions to work on, we might have ended up with a better finished product.  Our last meeting (during which time we finished up the activity and submitted it) was the most productive because we each worked on a different aspect.  One person worked on our presentation.  I worked on submitting the activity, adding our code to Gitorious, and adding all the important information to the Nutri wiki.  Another person worked on our poster.  If we could have worked that efficiently during the whole semester, we could have had an even better activity.  Even so, I am very pleased with our work this semester.

Success!

Last time I blogged, we had our nutrition activity running on Sugar, but it wasn't filling the whole window.  After trying several different options, we finally found a command that makes the window open in fullscreen mode, and that worked.  The only problem was that there was no way to exit out of the activity.  For now, we just added an exit button.  In the future, it would be nice to add the Sugar-style toolbar which would have its own exit button.

There were still quite a few steps to getting our activity published on the Sugar Activities website.  We created a wiki from which you can download the activity.  It also contains a list of the features we would like to add to our activity in the future.  We added our source code to Gitorious since it is an open source project.  Then we submitted our activity to Sugar.  Our activity's profile can be found here. 

Today I had to go back into the activity's profile and add a few things that I missed yesterday.  I needed to add Alex as one of the authors, and our logo so it would show up on the profile page.  This proved to be somewhat difficult.  It took me awhile to even get to the place where I could edit this information, and when I got there, the links and buttons to add information weren't working.  I hopped onto the Sugar IRC channel, and asked if anyone had advice.  They did, and I was able to add the missing information.  That was a little exciting for me because it was the first time I had used the IRC (except when we were just messing around because we had to use it for a class assignment).

We also created a poster about the Nutri activity for Thursday's poster session.  I think it turned out pretty nice.

Coming Down to the Wire

Last week we successfully ran our nutrition program in the Sugar Emulator.  The program works fine except it shows up in a Ubuntu-looking window, not the standard Sugar window.  We think this is because our GUI is inside a window instead of a vbox.  The problem with simply changing to a vbox is that other components depend on the window.  There is some instruction on integrating the standard Sugar toolbars into an activity.  I think this might also help with our window problem.  After that, we will be able to submit our activity and create the wiki.

Roadblock

We are still trying to run our activity on the Sugar OS.  We've been reading different documentation that we think might help us.  Also, Austin emailed the developers' mailing list to see if we could get more help that way.  Hopefully we will get the activity working today since we are getting down to the last couple weeks of the semester.  We also need to start planning our presentation.  We're planning to meet up this weekend to get caught up.

Sugarizing

Our nutrition activity is ready to be sugarized!  We found the lost sugar activity manual that explains how to revise our program so that it works on the Sugar OS.  During our last meeting, we added the code that we thought was necessary, but it still doesn't work when we launch the activity in Sugar.  That will be our task today.  Once we have that working correctly, we can submit it to the Sugar Activity team for approval and write some information for our Wiki.  At that point, we will post a list of our desired features.  (The list is long because our program is very simple so far!)

Slowly but Surely ...

We continue to work on our Sugar activity in Python.  Since none of us is very familiar with Python and the PyGTK framework, it is a slow process.  Integrating the GUI elements with our data has been the trickiest part.  After simplifying our original plan several times, we have finally come up with a program that is ready to be sugarized. Once we have created our icon and bundled the program into an .XO package, we need to get our activity onto the Sugar Labs website so that it can be downloaded.  I think we will also have a page on the wiki where we can post some information about our activity, including features that we would like to add.  There was a very helpful FLOSS manual that spelled out the whole process (referenced in an earlier blog), but it is gone now.  I did find a way to submit our .XO package.  I'd really like to make sure we've included everything before we submit the activity to the review team.  We may email the development team to try to find that manual, or we may just try to submit the activity and hope we did everything correctly. 

POSSCON

I attended POSSCON on Friday.  There were 2 workshops sessions, each 2 hours long, as opposed to the many 45-minute sessions on the previous days.  In the car ride up to the conference, someone who attended the conference the day before talked about the 3D printer presentation.  I hadn't been interested in this topic when I saw it on the website, but I was more interested after hearing about it so I attended the workshop.  They showed us some free open source software that one can use to create 3D models to print on the printer.  They also set up tables with different components of the printer so that attendees could attempt to put one together.  The workshop was very interesting, but I would have liked to hear more about what they see as major future uses of 3D printers if they become a standard tool for households and businesses.

The second workshop I attended was on Drupal, which is an open source tool for creating large, complex websites.  I was fairly interested in this software, but was very disappointed in the presentation.  For the first hour and a half of the workshop, 2 guys talked through a PowerPoint presentation of Drupal.  The slides were all formatted the same:  bullet points in white text on a black background.  I would have appreciated a demonstration of Drupal and some of the websites that illustrate Drupal's unique abilities.  I tried to download Drupal while in the workshop so I could get a better idea of how it worked, but it seemed more involved than what I was willing to deal with just to test it out. 

I think that Thursday would have been a much better day to attend the conference.  There were more sessions available because they were shorter.  I thought the 2-hour sessions were too long.  I also think that many presenters didn't stick around for Friday.  Many of the booths were empty.  My classmates who attended on Thursday saw Walter Bender give a presentation on an XO laptop, and were able to chat with him after.

Overall, it was a good experience, but I wish I had been able to go on Thursday instead of Friday.