[etoys-dev] Re: What about shipping DrGeo in Etoys?

[David Corking]

+1

DrGeo loads itself into the Object Catalog.  So distributing in the
image is the most convenient thing for users - as they can include it
in projects, and share them, without having to tell their fellow
students "load DrGeo before loading my cool project".  (*)

Kedama and Connectors are similarly useful construction kits for
building projects.

To be honest, I think DrGeo deserves to be in the Supplies flap.
DrGeo isn't just for studying geometry: as I understand it, it is a
flexible vector drawing tool, and I imagine there is a whole range of
creative possibilities that come with that.

It is 300 kilobytes on disk.  Is Etoys size on disk or memory
consumption a problem for distributors?  Is there room for it on small
Sugar sticks and on the XO, or will it push something else out ?   I
can imagine it being difficult to fit on handheld devices like iPod
Touch, Android phones or Nokia N800.  Even though Etoys doesn't work
any of those places yet, I think a feature request for the future
should be a way to make sure bigger tools like Kedama, Connectors and
DrGeo can be unloaded before distribution.

David

* I found that it is easy to save DrGeo in a project, but it makes
each new project file over 300 kB on disk.  It is easy to accidentally
make a project file that depends on DrGeo but does not include it.  It
is a bad experience to open a project file with DrGeo dependencies, as
the dialog message is not helpful to the inexperienced user:  "Reading
an instance of DrGCurveCostumeStyle. Which modern class should it
translate to?"   If DrGeo is distributed in the Etoys image, all these
troubles are avoided, though a problem of backward compatibility is
introduced.