Last week we received a very kind visitor. Tomeu Vizoso, maintainer and developer of several Sugar core modules, came to our office in A Coruña to share with us his ideas and to talk about the current status of the project.

In a hole, creating technologies that help children and try to change education is really a very beautiful goal. We were shocked when Tomeu told us about the size of deployments in some countries of South America, keep rocking guys.

There are some myths and misconceptions about the OLPC project. One of them is that almost everybody uses Windows on their OLPCs. The fact is that almost nobody want Windows in their laptops and most of the teachers are asking for Sugar powered devices.

I talked to Tomeu in order to know what is the status of email in Sugar, and he replied that they do not have any solution yet. So I proposed him to try to get Modest running in Sugar as the current look&feel of the pure gtk+ version seemed to fit very well into Sugar’s UI experience.

In the Sugar UI you don’t have exactly applications. They call them activities, and you could have activities like read, write, chat or browse Internet. Having a single window per activity is highly desirable, and stuff like modal dialogs are almost forbidden.

Then I built tinymail and modest using current Sugar libraries (pretty easy BTW as they use very well known GNOME technologies). Here it is the result, note that is not fully “sugarized” and that the platform misses some icons here and there but it looks nice for just a short hackfest session.