Day 24: Finale

The project has been completed, submitted, and accepted.  One can visit the Activity information page hosted on Sugar Lab's wiki or head on over to the Activity wiki page developed by our team.  At the time of writing this blog entry, our activity is categorized as 'experimental' and has 13 downloads.  Also, the other members of the team have been able to create a poster that summarizes the events taken in order to make this activity usable by the Sugar software that will be available on display tomorrow from 11:30am to 1:30pm.

We must now prepare a presentation for our final grade in CSCI 462, Software Engineering.  From fixing a bug in the software to developing our own Activity, we will be sure to report on all aspects of the project (including information about Sugar Labs founder, Walter Bender).

Day 23: Victory!

It's done... for the most part.  Megan found a quick function that allows the Activity to appear fullscreen and without  any of the 'windowed' features.  The only thing we need now is a way to quit the Activity by means of incorporating the Sugar toolbar or creating an exit button in the Activity that calls the PyGTK exit( ) function.  Since much of the headache is now over, we can begin to focus on the presentation aspect of the project.  We currently have an open office presentation hosted on RapidSVN in order for all team members to be able to add and make changes to the file.  We are beginning to see the end to this project, but that doesn't mean we will not continue to keep it alive.  While it doesn't have much functionality at the moment, we are able to leave it open for continued development.

On another note, we were able to configure our Activity's icon to be transparent and change color based on the color of the Sugar user's XO character.

At today's team meeting, we can try to submit the Activity for review by the Editor so that we can also begin creating the wiki page.

Day 22: Sugar App Fights Back

So, we have come across our first real roadblock in creating our Activity for the Sugar software, and it's not so much our coding as it is porting the program to the Sugar platform.  Currently, the Activity will appear for use in the Sugar emulator, but it comes in the form of a window.  We cannot have this happen because we are not sure that the XO laptops have a window feature, seeing as how all they run is the Sugar OS which incorporates any Activities into a single plane.

In analyzing the two files involved in porting the Activity, the Python and XML files, we have found a key piece which sets the Activity to be opened in a PyGTK window.  However, we need to find something that allows for the Activity to not only fill the entire screen like other published Activities, but also remove the 'windowed' view.  We feel a solution is just around the corner, so we'll hopefully have some positive news to share for the next post.

At today's team meeting I would also like to start on creating the presentation for our project.

Day 21: Pack it up, Ship it out

Packaging our Activity has proven to be more difficult than we thought.  We have read multiple wiki pages and compared our code to source code from example Activities to try and learn by example.  Since one of our worries is that we are forgetting to import a certain component in the Python file, I will have to try to diff the example file with our own in looking at just those pieces that do some form of importing.  I have also sent an e-mail to the sugar-devel mailing list to see if they can return to us a list of step-by-step instructions as to how to package the Activity into an .xo file format.

A couple of weeks ago we were able to get the project into a repository using RapidSVN (downloads available through this link), so any changes that may affect the file to "a point of no return" can be rolled back.  Every member of the team has a working copy checked out so that we all can try and create the solution to our packaging problem.  One note, our team member Jordan found that the .xo file format functions just like a zip file, and certain tools can merely extract or compact the associated Activity files.  Hopefully during our next meeting we will have the solution or at least I will get a response from the sugar-devel support.

Day 20: Status Report

Now that we have completed week 3 in our timeline, we are prepared to apply a checklist against a set of possible problems that we may run into in using the Activity.  This sort of testing should be relatively easy as the only user input is the number of Fists of the food group that he or she has eaten.  Also, user input is limited to the choice of number provided by PyGTK's combo box object in the form of a drop down list.  I will have to meet with the rest of the team to talk about any additional testing. 

I am also getting ready for week 5 trying to find out how to get a wiki page published and placed on the site with the other Activities.  We also need to know how to bundle our Activity in order to transfer it to the Sugar platform.  The Sugar Labs wiki describes "packaging activities in self-contained bundles [to allow] easy sharing, installation, removal, and backup."  So, we need to make sure we meet all these requirements in order for proper use of the Activity and the ability to send it to other Sugar platforms that do not already have the activity.  This is a process of interaction amongst the XO laptops, where the child without the Activity will receive it upon using something similar to a shared environment (an example that comes to my mind is the use of Windows' Sharepoint).