[sword-devel] Great interest in doing it the OLPC way. Re: OLPC interest still?

[avolunteer DrStovallFoundation]

Developers,
The OLPC greatest innovation is educational not technical.  I 
previously posted that OLPC had given us several technical 
innovations and imitations.  India heard OLPC and now thinks 
they will build a $10 (that's right ten US dollar) computer in 
India.  But Rapier and the best Sword implementations are a 
looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong llllllllllong 
way from being anything near the educational quality worthy of 
the OLPC designers.  I could and should write another book 
about this.  But there are many other things which I could and 
should do.  I'll just say this.  The OLPC was designed to 
enable "playful learning."  Nearly 30 years ago, I made Paul's 
Gramcord run on the 1 MhZ floppy disk system that was sold to 
Theological schools.  It was a far better Bible study program 
than any of the Sword interfaces and is still being used in 
many of the best theological schools.  But it does not do what 
the Lord has laid on my heart and it is not "playful learning." 
Sword serves a great purpose for mature minds who want to stay 
in touch with the Holy Scriptures.  I am thrilled to have 
Rapier on my N800.  It would serve a very few children better 
than a book would.  But the majority of this world's children 
need "playful learning."  Please see laptop.org for more 
information and also Google for "playful learning."
A Volunteer

PS  Pierre knows how to get on with people.  You may want to 
reread the following.  Especially the part about getting as 
many people as possible to either do it your way or their way.

--- Pierre Amadio <pierre.amadio at laposte.net> wrote:

> Hi there.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 11:12:03AM -0500, Zachary M. Oglesby wrote:
> > I have done a little reading on this and would recommend that people read
> > the following. Also I think a good starting point would be to adapt the
> > Rapier code and see if we can get it to work with Sugar. In the long run I
> > think it would be great if we could get this to work in the ebook mode that
> > the XO has to save battery life, but one step at a time.
> 
> I have zero experience in project management, but still, i think the
> first step to take would be to check out what's already existing, just
> in case there's already something cool, or not, and to get in touch with
> all project, or at least most of them, in order to try to have as many
> people as possible in a single project.
> 
> A quick search show:
> 
> http://xobible.com/
> plan to use bibletime as a base and to add some mp3 feature on top of
> that. 
> Sounds interesting to me, i just don't get why they pick a qt project
> and not a gtk one (if i recall correctly, the olpc is mainly gtk based).
> 
> http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1425.msg11011
> Other people also wanting to make a bible based activity.
> 
> http://bibledit.sourceforge.net/
> Changelog states it runs on olpc.
> 
> I'm sure there are others. Anybody know what is the main olpc community
> mailing list/web forum ? It would be a good idea to check there.
> 
> Then, i think we should have a clear idea of what is planned. Is it a
> nice bible study tool that would run on an olpc, or is it a nice olpc
> activity that will take advantage of what the olpc offer ?
> 
> I think if the first goal is targeted, using an already featurfull
> program is the way to go (and i would think gnome sword is the best
> candidate here as it's gtk based. I do not know if libgnome is available
> on olpc though. Not being able to compile it without libgnome was what
> drove me to start rapier).
> 
> If the second goal is targeted, then creating something from scratch in
> python (so the "read the source" feature of the olpc would be possible)
> seems the way to go. I would advise not to start with rapier itself, as the
> code is really not that good:
> 
> - It  does not use libglade that should be available in the olpc 
>   (it is sort of available in maemo, but i choosed not to used it anyway 
>   because i intended to make something really simple and wanted to wait 
>   untill gazpacho was ready for hildon stuff before playing with glade
>   file).
> 
> - Internationalisation is nearly not existing, and it's more easy to get
>   that correctly when prepared from the beginning.
> 
> - The download/manage module is awfull. (Why is there no python wrapper
>   for the InstallMgr class ? :-) ).
> 
> If there is a clear description of what is needed, a rewrite of an
> rapier like olpc activity starting from scratch is just a matter of a couple
> of weeks and would save time later on if started on solid ground.
> 
> So, is there anybody who feels like gathering the existing, find the most
> appropriate place to get in touch with the olpc community and make a
> summary of what he found to us and all similar project ?
> 
>  
> 
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