Touch more Englebart and Kay (and plenty of Berners-Lee) please, hold the Gates and Jobs.
*FANTASTIC* review from Danny Ayers on the OLPC. You should take the time to read it.
So Danny,
Texas?
*CLASSIC* :D (you’ll have to read the post to understand. :)
re: The UI,
It’s time like this that I am reminded of just how tragic Jef Raskin’s early departure from this world truly was and is. Of course, that doesn’t mean his work can not continue (in fact, it has continued, though it seems at the moment to be somewhat stalled?) Take for example,
Is Archy designed with vision-impaired people in mind?
Yes, disabled, blind, and mouse challenged people have been considered in Archy’s design. For example, our design avoids things like modal dialog boxes, and eliminates any need to use the mouse in text editing. As soon as Archy can speak, it will be vision-impaired-person usable.
If the primary focus is third-world countries where coming across a disabled, blind, mouse-challenged, and/or hearing impaired child is an all too common occurrence, shouldn’t the User *Interface* be built upon a foundation in which has the ability for humans with disabilities of this nature to — you know — interface with the device?
Maybe it’s just me who feels this way, but if the OLPC truly wants to do the right thing, they would scrap the Sugar UI and start over with the ZoomWorld UI Specification as its foundation. Archy (the text-manipulating and command-issuing part of “The Humane Interface“, which if I understand things correctly, is what the ZoomWorld UI specification represents) would be the best place to start. The SVN repository has been down for a while, but my guess is that with proper encouragement, this could quickly change. And if/when it became available, the Python code base, which is licensed under the cc:by-nc-sa, would obviously fit well within the current focus of Python/Smalltalk/Squeak at the core of the OLPC programming language focus.
So what’s the point of building Yet Another Corporate America Influenced/Driven/Fueled Desktop UI when The Humane Interface already exists?
Once again, Danny has extended info in regards to his own thoughts and feelings on the Sugar UI and the OLPC in general. You should really take the time to read it.
Thanks for the reality check, Danny!
Update: So I hadn’t realized that Enso, a part of the Humanized project, is in fact an extension of Jef Raskin’s work carried on by his son,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Pioneering_the_information_appliance
His work is being extended and carried on by his son Aza Raskin at Humanized, a company that was started shortly after Raskin’s death to continue his legacy. Recently, Humanized released a product called Enso which is based on Raskin’s work. Enso is dedicated to Raskin’s memory.
Nice! Having learned this makes me quite happy that when I first encountered Enso a month or two back, I didn’t write the post that I was immediately inspired to write: a criticism of Enso as an obvious copy-cat implementation of Archy. Obviously I didn’t realize how accurate I would have been, though for all the wrong reasons. ;-)
