On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 09:44:37AM -0500, Howard Stearns wrote:
I'm thinking not in terms of what it is, but rather how and in what context it would be used:
- To be used ubiquitously in any context, it needs to not only be small and
have good battery life, but it needs to be cheap and "losable." I think Alan gives an example of taking it to the beach or a raft in the pool. (This also implies replicated external storage.)
XO has all these features.
- I don't want to just execute prescribed tasks with it, I want to explore
and problem-solve (e.g., in the http://nakedobjects.org sense). This may be getting beyond the scope of an electronic book, but I think this is consistent with the general thrust of the dynabook and dynamic languages community. (You could maybe argue that real books with pages are more exploratory/problem-solving than scrolls.) In any case, my feeling (which I'm a relatively recent convert to) is that the best way to do this is with direct manipulation (in both the language sense like self, and the UI sense like the iPhone).
This area is the most lacking area of the Dynabook. Pepsi, Slate, Magritte, Seaside, Enlightenment[1], Sugar[2], eToys, Scratch, Tweak, and Croquet are all partial solutions to the problem, but they are all quite separate so far. This list is clearly Squeak-biased, as I don't keep up with other projects. I don't understand what you mean by "the UI sense", so I cannot comment.
- The things I want to explore and manipulate include all media, for which
I want to both get existing media/communications (networked) and capture my own (camera and microphone, possibly in stereo or higher degrees for 3D scanning).
I don't think the hardware -- or the software -- is quite there yet to accomplish all this, but it's getting close. To the degree that one believes that the dynabook hasn't really happened yet, I wonder if it is because we have not yet satisfyingly achieved all the above simultaneously.
I think the hardware is ready, and OLPC does a great job of uniting the hardware with secure AND extensible software. XO is definitely the closest thing to the Dynabook that has yet been created.
[1]: The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are, in my opinion, the only non-smalltalk graphic framework that can rival Morphic and Tweak in the area of statically composable models, views, and behavior. However, being C, it cannot really do post-load composability. It allows composition all the way until load-time.
[2]: Sugar, the XO default shell.