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by growtofill 2455 days ago
> some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows. They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives

Haven’t found a screenshot of Sugar OS in the article, but I assume it’s not that different conceptually? Still files, apps, windows?
3 comments
em-bee 2455 days ago
you can try the interface on sugarizer.org

it really is quite different. it centers around activities (which are apps effectively) but it has no windows, only fullscreen, and you can only open one activity at a time. to open another you have to close the current one.

the state of an app is logged to a journal. to continue work that you did before you go to the journal to pick up the state that you are looking for. by default you get the apps last state, or you can choose to open a new fresh state.

so for example you open the paint activity. first time you get a blank canvas. next time you get your last drawing. or you can select to create a new drawing. or use the journal to pick out an old drawing.

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a-saleh 2455 days ago
Not on the surface? In the shell you have select "activities" that you can choose, and if the "activity" you chose is a standard linux app, or a explorer-style application (i.e. I remember I was still able to run Nautilus?) you would see file structure.

But you would be able to use it without encountering "a file" or "a folder".

I remember window management being minimalistic, apps went full-screen, there might have been a switcher.

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mathnode 2455 days ago
Not at all, it was a rather funky radial menu.

I have no idea why it wasn't just a customised version of something like xfce, lxqt and what have you.

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ehvatum 2454 days ago
Remember, this was a low power computer with limited memory, for children, and getting it into the hands of those children as soon as possible was paramount. So, naturally, the user interface had to be alien and written completely from scratch in Python. Existing user interface paradigms were obviously a non-starter. Time-tested ways of doing things were not applicable. Children are not going to understand concepts such as background tasks and multiple windows. Have you ever seen a child try to use a real computer? They just don't get it. Everyone knows this.
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