Another thought occurs to me. I wonder what will happen when all of these innocent, newly-empowered children start Googling and run across screen caps of the Paris Hilton video, or worse. The vision tarnishes when it meets reality.
@ Luciano’s ratpoison UI
They might have a hard time justifying the use of something called “RatPoison” on the One Laptop Per Child project. 
I also agree with Mr. Negroponte’s comments on the way we bottleneck youth into using “one true system”. I hope this SugarUI gives a bit more freedom and creativity back to the user(child), even if it is just rudimentary. If anything it will hopefully give them a different perspective to add to the later enforced “standard” UI training they will endure, (whatever that may be at the time).
Word, Excel, Windows and other “real world” tools were designed to be used by people who didn’t grow up with computers with minimal amounts of training. I doubt kids who cut their teeth on something like Sugar are going to have much trouble learning them. Whether they’ll want to use them is another matter…
The single biggest reason I suspect I should continue to mostly ignore OLPC is the messianic pretentious blow-hards here defending it from imaginary attacks. If people like that are involved, the project can’t end well. You’re doing a heckuva job, zealots!
Sugar, on the other hand, looks to be interesting for all the reasons Jeff has given. In addition to user testing, I think it needs a team of fit-and-finish geeks. (Those icons are horrid, especially the “person” which looks like branding for Cingular.) But it’s still interesting.
Maybe you don’t want your kids to be information workers - but for the last couple generations parents wanted exactly that: for their kids to go to college and get a white collar job. But somehow the average while collar job seems to have become more menial while the blue collar jobs are less so. While I was brought up to believe I’d be better off working in an office, I see a lot more commonalities between being a software developer and being a skilled mechanic or tradesperson than I do between my job and the white-collar jobs of the past.
so basically…you likey very much?
pardon my french ;0
quote
And the Linux community apes both companies, occasionally throwing in a curveball of their own. But when was the last time anyone tried a radically different UI on the desktop?
/quote
Ever heard of Compiz/Beryl? try it!!
The system was meant to encourage development of the next generation by making this entire OS different than anything they’ve seen before, so that their minds won’t be pidgeonholed into thinking that a GUI “must” act or look in a particular way.
These are the future leaders, programmers, mothers, fathers, etc. of our world… they should be given as wide a range of experiences as possible. This could be the experience that leaves them thinking, “Hey, this open source stuff isn’t so difficult after all!”
On that note, the people who criticize it for being difficult to adapt to can’t be all that bright; I was a fairly competent user of the emulator after only about 15 minutes - AFTER having used Windows, Mac OS, and Gnome/KDE. It’s not hard, it just takes a little extra loosening of the shackles that the commercial software companies have placed on your mind.
While the sub $100 is great stuff, not sure if the dumbing down of the OS was required at all. As Jerry Kindall mentions kids (that too kids in a slum and hardly with education) have managed to learn to use windows. What is required is the access and a sub $100 pc goes a long way. Here is a link to the experiment and the guy who installed the pc in the slum
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm
even an idiot can learn how to click on icons/menus in windows/osx/linux or any other standard system/gui.
the point is to get the information to the children, to give them a tool to help them learn new things they wouldn’t be able to without it, to support maximum amount of interaction in the information exchange.
I started out on an Apple II as a kid. The radically different interface on that computer did not impair my ability to learn windows or OS X in the slightest.
I have several XO’s now, and IMHO, the OLPC mission is in trouble! The thing ships without instructions, not even any somewhere in the machine. the OLPC people say that this just reflects the entire design of the XO, that children will discover how to use it. Well, I have watched children of all ages just look at it, fiddle and give up…quickly.
After further trial and error, I report that this thing is just broken. The touchpad doesn’t work, the OS crashes (what a thing to bring to the Third World!), applications don’t run, and even basic word processing files don’t conform to any standard (for sharing with others). What six year old needs to learn Linux OS commands, Pippy programming language, or ADSR envelopes for tone generators? They need to learn basic literacy skills and the XO doesn’t come with any software to help with that learning. Even if it did, a child couldn’t get it to work because the OS and hardware is so buggy. Children of the third world are not stupid. A few minutes with these and they’ll know instantly that time spent collecting firewood will be way more helpful to them than one minute spent with an XO!
Jim, you must be stupid, because the OLPC comes with a complete suite of UI applications built on top of the sugar interface. There is no need to learn Linux OS commands unless you are a developer.
If the OLPC doesn’t remain open source then it is going to simply become a watered down corporate desktop. This would be a worse case for the potential third world users, and will completely alienate the open source community surrounding the project.
I think that the ability to develop on the OLPC is as important as assisting an increase in basic literacy skills. Soon, there will be a million of these in the wild, so I would expect a significant community of developers will form.
Do you argue that a start menu and desktop is a better educational tool than sugar?
Can you run the most recent version of visual studio on the OLPC?
@VG: as much as I like and use Compiz, I’d hardly call that innovative. You still have a desktop, windows, icons… It just lets you manage your windows in a fancy way. (that’s why it’s a window manager duh).
@PL
“Will they get jobs if they say “I have experience with OLPC””?
I don’t think this is really a concern. From what I understand, the driving idea of OLPC is that technology can be used for learning, which is quite different than believing that technology itself needs to be learned. The goal is to teach kids math and science, how to work together, and how to think about solving problems. We should be more than happy if the best interface to meet that goal ends up being poor training for Microsoft Windows.