Black&White Project/Kiwix for Sugar

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Deliverables

  • Portage of Kiwix for Sugar (100% finished, directly usable without major bug)
  • Re-design of the user interface for a perfect integration and match of sugar guidelines.
  • Compatibility with Sugar journal
  • Documentation in the wiki of the sugar foundation
  • Delivrance of an .xo file
  • Integration of Kiwix as a Sugar-activity

Dates & Duration

  • Start Date: September 5th
  • Estimated Delivery Date: September 30th.

User Interface

Sugar is a special interface mainly used by the OLPC Project. It is designed primarily for educational purposes, targeting children with no computer experience and ranging from primary school to secondary school.

Kiwix is a complete desktop software with many features and capabilities. In order to integrate Kiwix properly within Sugar, we made the following U.I choices:

Tool Bar

The toolbar is the main out-of-context interface for the user. An icon on the toolbar is associated either to an action or displays a sub-toolbar. Those can not be chained (only one sub-toolbar level).

  • Home
  • Back
  • Forward
  • Display (quite common to display this as sub)
    • Text Size Up
    • Text Size Down
    • Full Screen (remove toolbar completely)
    • Copy
    • Search in page
    • Toggle bookmarks list
  • Bookmark this page
  • Options (drop down menu)
    • Toggle Content Manager
    • Open file
    • Recently opened
    • Print
    • Random Article
    • Help
    • Save as...
    • PDF
    • Purge history
  • Quit

Tabs

While Sugar support tabs, we believe it's not appropriate to use them here. Eventually decided to include them but without highlight on them.

Dropped features

The following features are not accessible from Sugar.

  • Help
    • About
    • Report a bug
    • Request a feature
  • Tools/Integrity check
  • Status bar
  • Language switch
  • Skin switch
  • Select All
  • Preferences? Currently it's in but I'm not sure it should.
  • Full Bookmarks Manager (Simplified version exists though)

Sugar-specific features

  • Bookmark list
  • Journal entry for each page viewed
  • Sugar activity + .xo package
  • Neighborhood broadcast ???? not sure about that yet.

Screen shots

Sugar-ring.png Kiwix displayed on the Sugar ring (home screen) because it's a favorite activity. Otherwise, you need to go to the journal to launch it.

Sugar-kiwix-home.png Kiwix just launched. Back/Next and Mark page are on right of search bar to follow Surf activity convention.

Sugar-kiwix-displaybar.png Display toolbar activated. Gives access to Search in page, toggle bookmark bar, Zoom IN and Zoom OUT and Copy selection

Sugar-kiwix-bookmarks.png The bookmark bar opened. Notice that you Mark and un-mark a page by using the Star icon on top-right. If a page is marked, star goes yellow. Bookmark list has been simplified.

Sugar-kiwix-optionsmenu.png Options menu gives access to all the non-direct actions possible. Maybe we can remove some items in it.

Sugarness

Bellow is a list of imaginable development regarding Sugar integration:

Item Difficulty Comment
Native Sugar U.I Difficult Requires reimplementing most U.I code (J.S) in Python.

Very unlikely that we'll properly maintain that over time.

100% Look-alike U.I in gecko skin Difficult We can do something that's 70% like sugar but remaining

is very hard to achieve if possible.

Journal Keep feature Doable Upon click on Keep, record the session + ability to reopen a session.

Session will contain:

  • Opened ZIM
  • Browsing history
Journal activity record Easy At quit, open the sugar activity entry dialog to add an entry to the journal

Journal is just a log of what users did.

Bookmark OK Ability to mark pages, display a list of marked pages and click on them.

Bookmarks should persit over sessions

See also