AbiWord on OLPC progress

Hey everyone,

Sorry I've been a bit quiet lately. I'm staying at my Uncle's place
in a little town in NH and there's no internet, which is both a
blessing and a curse. :) I apologize in advance if it takes me a day
or two to reply again.

I've been making some progress though. I've created a WordProcessor
activity in Sugar, the OLPC shell, and managed to get AbiWord embedded
in Sugar with GtkPlugs. Obligatory screenshot:

  http://flickr.com/photos/erikpukinskis/188773007/

I have been playing with cutting down the interface (obviously there
will be more than just a Bold button. :) But I have a few questions:

1) My current plan is to have a --enable-olpc command line option,
which would both start up AbiWord in a GtkPlug instead of a window,
and would signal the alternate interface. I figured out how to create
a commpand line parameter, and get its value into a method in AP_Args,
but I need to be able to access that object in, for example,
XAP_UnixFrameImpl::_createTopLevelWindow. But the arguments don't get
passed down that far. How should I get that information passed in?

Am I committing cardinal sins of AbiWord?

Also, a couple other bits of news:

I have found an organization in Boston that provides after school and
summer camp for low income kids, and I've made some connections with
the director, and I think they'll let me do usability testing with the
kids, so that's really exciting! It should be an excellent source of
information about how well the interface is working for kids who don't
have very good literacy skills yet.

I've also got a semi-formal document listing high-level requirements
for AbiWord on OLPC:

  http://snowedin.net/ideas/AbiWord+on+OLPC+Requirements

It'll be changing, but it's a start.

Best,

Erik
Received on Thu Jul 13 17:09:11 2006