Red Hat and the One Laptop per Child folks have been slowly iterating on both putting together a working operating system and taking the first baby steps in figuring out how to build an envionment for kids. A few weeks ago we had a pretty successful demo of the software for countries that are most committed to deploying the laptops. We got some great feedback and got to show off our initial design ideas and talk about the future.
Last week there was a design review. Bryan, Diana, Marco and Dan all got together to talk about what the next steps should be and what we should be working on. The notes from that meeting can be seen on that design review page that Marco put together. Diana put together some mockups that show what we could possibly do.
I’d like to take some time to talk about what those mockups mean. Out of context, they might seem strange, or fail to deliver the full story.
This image describes what we’re thinking about presence. I talked briefly about this in a previous posting but this is the first time that we’ve really taken a step to make it part of the environment. In today’s desktops, “chat” is a program. It stands alone. You can talk to your friends, you can paste text, you can even video conference, but as a program it is completely separated from the rest of the programs that you use on a day to day basis. In fact, if you go and download one of our daily images, chat is still trapped in a tab of its own.
Once of our stated goals is to create a social environment for the kids. So what we’re trying to do is to turn the idea of presence and who is around into a basic element of the environment. Other programs that are also being used in the environment can assume that there’s a method to find other people and what they can do. We hope that this will create an entire application environment that encourages collaboration and sharing.
So at an implementation level, what we’re going to do is make the presence pane something that’s always around. To save screen real estate it will probably slide in and out from the side of the screen, but if you want to choose how to share a document with a friend or send a message to someone that slide pane will pop up and let you pick which one of your friends you want to send it to.
Another issue is “where to start?” I’ll bet that if you start up your computer today, whether or not it’s a mac, windows or linux machine, that you end up starting with the desktop. It’s where you start programs, manipulate files, etc. But since we’re not using a desktop metaphor the question is an interesting one.
So knowing that we’re building an environment around sharing and creating documents, talking to other people and expressing ourselves, one possible option is to just create a personalized home page that shows what you’ve done recently, what your friends have done recently and offer an easy way to see what’s going on around you.
Of the screenshots, this is the one that’s most likely to change over time. It’s strictly an experiment and we’re hoping to get a bunch more ideas of what might work. We’re happy to try and fail often. That way you know you’re making progress.
On another note, I did mention above that we have daily images available. One Laptop also has a developer board program in place. If you’re interested in helping with the laptop and you want to feel the full environment you might want to sign up to have one of the boards sent to you. We have about 500 boards available right now.
-
How will the laptops communicate with each other?
ethernet?IMHO, I suggest you to put more vibrant and eyes-friendly colours.
That green looks awesome but, is very hard to look at, after few moments. -
Even if everything doesn’t turn out to be useful, all this experimenting is bound to produce some fresh and new perspectives on collaboration work. Keep the innovation coming :-)
-
The laptops all have built in wireless that can take advantage of mesh networking. This means that they can all talk to each other, even if the internet as a whole isn’t available.
And don’t get stuck on the colors. Those are likely to be easy to change for the kids to match the laptop colors, which will also be varied.
-
I’m a developer on Adium (a popular Mac IM client). For the upcoming 1.0 version we implemented the contact-list-slides-in-from-side idea you mentioned, and it works very well. In general, I’ll be excited to watch where this goes, as the idea of presence and communication being an integral part of the system is somewhere I want to take the Mac.
-
“idea of presence and who is around into a basic element of the environment” sounds like Galago, http://www.galago-project.org/about.php
I asked before elsewhere, is the social aspect of this related in any way to the Mugshot project?
Great hardward and project!
-
Great stuff, Chris – very exciting to have presence such a core component (have just blogged a link here too… but wanted to add the following): our open source Jabber-based BuddySpace has some geolocation concepts built in, but generally has strayed way too far in the techie/geek-ish direction.
The good news is that we’re stripping it all down for a much more no-brainer no-install environment we’re calling MSG, will be AJAX, open source, etc), and will be bundling that into our Hewlett Foundation-funded Open Content Initiative courseware and tools (just begun, see Open University OCI pages; though targetted at an older audience, some of the core ideals are clearly similar, and I’m hoping we can cross-fertilize to some extent. Stay tuned!
One quick comment on the presence stuff is that while staying simple on the one hand, you’ll need to cater for some of the multiple dimensions of presence (state of attention rather than just online/offline, location, perhaps mood) – without going ‘too overboard’. Odigo, bless their hearts, had one of the nicest multi-dimensional presence-state-pickers a few years ago, i.e. both simple and powerful… I hope to post more on this in the OLPC wiki eventually.
Cheers
-Marc -
It’s not directly related to the mugshot project, no. But the mugshot guys and the one laptop guys do share a lot of ideas back and forth so there is some cross pollenation.
-
These mockups look great but they also remind me a lot of maemo (http://maemo.org) who are also doing things like integrating IM presence etc.
Is there any way the Sugar and Maemo projects can be brought closer together? It would seem a shame to duplicate effort when they are so similar in aims, screen dimensions, toolkit, OS etc.
-
Pingback from Confuse-a-cat » Кучка on June 18, 2006 at 6:18 pm
-
Hi,
Will the browser be able to play flash embedded content ?
For example is there support for flash player to run on the $100 laptops
Comments are now closed.
Become a Friend of Gnome!
Watch as I Grow
interesting stuff
- Flumotion manual December 28, 2009
- So you want to stream a conference? -- wingolog December 28, 2009
- UniversVideo Plugin December 5, 2009
- ITheora - Home December 3, 2009
- Ogg.class.php December 3, 2009
11 comments