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Sugar Digest

1, Redwood City: Raul Gutierrez Segales, Bernie Innocenti and I have been busy hacking in a mini Sugar Camp this weekend. Our goal is to build an interface between the Sugar Journal and several on-line services. Specifically, Raul and I are working on an interface between the Journal and Facebook and Bernie is working on an interface between the Journal and Google Drive.

Here’s is where we are at at the moment:

• We have a control panel widget for managing your Facebook account. It saves a token in .gconf that can be used to make transactions with Facebook. (We plan to add a section to manage all of the users online accounts, probably in the manner of the GNOME online account manager. Suggests (and patches) welcome.)
• We have a “Share on” extension to the Journal palette menu. Right now, the only option is to share on Facebook. Raul has written a class that manages a Facebook object consisting of the Journal preview image, the title, and the description. The preview image is uploaded as a photo object to the Sugar Journal album on Facebook. The title and description are added as a comment. (Question for the design team: can we bump up the resolution of the preview image?)
• We are finishing up work on two extensions to the Journal detail-view toolbar for Journal entries with corresponding Facebook entries. The Refresh Button grabs comments from Facebook and adds them to the Object description. The Like Button grabs likes from Facebook.

We’ve also explored using Facebook graph objects, which would open up a number of interesting options, but we have some infrastructure and authentication issues to sort through before we go too far down that path.

We’ll be uploading patches (sugar) and (sugar-artwork) pretty regularly throughout the weekend.

2. I blogged about a cool visualization of prime factors last week. Tony Forster and I coded it up in Turtle Blocks. Quite fun. It uses a simple iteration to calculate the prime factors and then a recursive algorithm to render the factors in a tree, e.g., 25=5×5. It cycles through the factors of 2 through 100, but it is easy enough to change the main loop to cycle through whatever range of numbers you’d like. It takes advantage of the on-the-fly box definition mechanism in Turtle Blocks and the ability to reference a box from the value in another box to manage the state as it changes in the recursion. Note that you can vary the playback speed by moving the mouse up or down on the screen.

In the community

3. When visiting Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, we bumped into Chris Blizzard, formerly the Red Hat project manager for Sugar.

Sugar Labs

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