Re: PATCH: AbiWord Sugar mode

On 7/25/06, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> I think that having the font toolbar item would be useful. My observation
> is that kids love to use fancy and large fonts if they can. It lets them
> be creative. If you have space, giving them the font button will make that
> easily discoverable. Has your research found out anything about this?

I agree... and I've heard from people working with kids that
formatting is one of the things they get really excited about. So I
definitely think it's a must.

I should say... the particular buttons in the patch are really just
random. I think the concept that I'd like to try first is something
like this sketch:

 http://flickr.com/photos/erikpukinskis/175390570/

The buttons in that sketch are:

* Share (make the document public so others could read/collaborate on it)
* Format (pop up the text formatting window)
* Insert (pop up the window for inserting an image)
* Table (show the Table menu)
* Undo
* Redo

But all of this is still very much in flux, and will depend a lot on
what happens in usability testing. That said, I updated my AbiWord
feature inventory to include my thinking on most of AbiWord's features
and whether to include them on the toolbar:

  http://snowedin.net/ideas/AbiWord+OLPC+Feature+Inventory

Which represents my current thinking, but I'm open to other thoughts.
In fact, that's a wiki page, so people can feel free to add their
thoughts.

> Also the rebuildMenu method is vital for loading many plugins. We'll need
> to fix that later.

OK. I'll keep it on my list of things to look into.

> I'll see if I can get the sugar development SDK running and give your
> patch a try. It looks rather unintrusive so we might be able to roll it
> directly into CVS-HEAD.

That's fine, but future patches might become more intrusive, so we
might still want to branch for some things. But we can cross that
bridge when we come to it.

> Keep up the great work.

Thanks!

Erik
Received on Wed Jul 26 16:32:25 2006