[Squeakland] How can the knights of the square brackets help the quest 2Be1?

[Andreas Raab]

Hi Markus -

> Guess that they are in a really early stage, and want to get some  
> more things settled before going public.

Well you got a peek at work that is going on *right now* (literally) at 
the OLPC offices.

> But I wonder, what kinds of projects and tutorials will be on, and if  
> there will be any localization efforts for e.g. Nigeria or if English  
> is ok there.

The way I understand it, all of it needs to be localized for the 
deployment. However, we expect to work with native speakers for that.

> I also wonder about the the future of Etoys for the 2Be1 - will the  
> next processors be fast enough to support Tweak - or will Tweak be  
> tweaked to support the current one?

Our immediate goal is to make eToys run well on the current hardware 
generation and that's looking good so far. We decided to go with the 
"old" eToys version just because that meant we could concentrate on 
dealing with those aspects that are specific to the hardware and 
software platform - i.e., optimizing a few things, making a nice 
integration with the sugar framework, providing more examples and 
documentation.

> Or will VP continue to enhance and tidy Etoys1? Tin Lizzie seems the  
> way to go....when can we start to play with Tin Lizzie?

As soon as I find a bit of time to tidy up a release ;-)

> Are we in "competition mode" -- are there signs that the python  
> (Ruby?) communities come up with a decent system to substitute the  
> Squeak-Etoys version?

I wouldn't call it "competition" - we try to encourage more educational 
content and other languages only add to our vision and aren't in 
conflict with it.

> The main question are: Can we help? How?

There is always a bunch of issues that we could use help with. For 
example, if you know someone who could work out Thai and Arabic script 
setting in Squeak that would be quite helpful. Alternatively, finding 
some time to work out a Pango integration with Squeak would help (since 
we could leverage the work done by OLPC for the languages that we don't 
support). Oh, and making Squeak IPv6 ready would be helpful, too (looks 
like OLPC will use IPv6). Also, it looks like OLPC will support CSound 
and we don't have support for that either (but it'd be great if we could 
just use the existing MIDI interface for it, etc).

Other than that, I think we have our bases covered so far. There is a 
bunch of VM stuff needed (Ian is working on that), Sugar integration 
(Bert is doing that) and a ton of UI fixes and tweaks (Yoshiki, Takashi, 
and Scott are working on that). We're also trying to work out some nicer 
tutorials (Takashi and Ted) and trying to get tutorials and 
documentation in order (Kim and Alan). I'm sure everybody could need 
some help here or there but unfortunately we're working on tight 
schedules (there is an october deadline looming over us which is the 
immediate goal to which at least the initial integration and VM parts 
need to be done).

> p.s. I forgot to mention and to thank Takashi Yamamiya San, who is  
> helping Yoshiki and Co. with the Etoys Part.

You also forgot to mention Scott and Ted, and Takashi is doing a lot 
more than just "helping" with eToys ;-)

Cheers,
   - Andreas