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June 4, 2008

An interesting part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which aims to (hopefully) supply at a cost of $100 (or less) laptops to millions of students in developing nations, is its customised graphical user interface.

Now unofficially identified as the Sugar Interface (SI), it presents the laptop user with a greatly simplified interface that's quite a departure from a traditional desktop interface.

"Mesh Networking" is actually one of the OLPC project's core features, since it enables OLPC laptops to connect together wirelessly to create potentially large networks, without access points or other infrastructure.

The Sugar Interface displays other nearby OLPC users and allows you to communicate with them using the Chat Activity feature. Other Activities also support screen sharing, so that multiple users can seamlessly collaborate on a single specific project.

The biggest change here is that Sugar is called a single-tasking interface, meaning that users can work with just one single application (called an "activity") at a time.

What's worse, this takes up the entire screen display, though you can run multiple activities simultaneously and still switch between them if you need to.

Another major difference is that the filesystem is presented as a virtual log of files, called the "Journal", which records multiple versions of files over time.

Despite the impressive work done so far on the Sugar Interface, there's still a lot of work ahead needed for this project to gain steam over time. It's adoption rate is expected to be proportional to the amount of flexibility the interface will have to offer down the road, and to the useful features when compared to a tradional Windows XP or Windows Vista desktop.

With OLPC's recent announcement of its co-operation with Microsoft on a version of XP for the XO-1, porting Sugar to Windows seems to be on the cards.

After all, the learning tools are more important than the operating system that powers them. That view is equally shared by Walter Bender, who recently resigned as OLPC's software chief to form Sugar Labs, which develops and promotes the Sugar Interface independently of OLPC.

To many, Linux is still the preferred OS, but if a Windows port eventuates, Sugar could run on the hundreds of millions of Windows systems around the world perhaps in a year or two.

To be sure, as far as Sugar is concerned, more radical changes are possibly in store for the near future. A lot of the interface's features, like Mesh Networking, user presence support and the Journal's file storing system could be very useful features across any Linux desktop.

Eventually, these may end up "declustered" from the Sugar GUI and made available for separate use in a range of other Linux applications and in any distro.

Source: LXER.

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