about+chat

On reboot, go to your "neighbourhood view" and check out all the little XO's now showing on your screen. This is the G1G1 community geeking out together like these two from the [|OLPC Learning Club]: Chatting with another XO user takes a little getting used to. Here's my easy step-by-step guide: Then you two, three or dozen can have fun chasing the conversation as the chat session whips up and off screen after every entry. Much scrolling is required to keep a conversation going. You can repeat this process with other activities too. I shared X0 photos with Rick Evans, [|Argotnaut], and [|RodFather] yesterday afternoon. We even did a video share by making XO videos we could all see. Now its your turn to explore the full G1G1 community. And remember, if you have problems, just ask for [|XO laptop help]. on the forum.
 * 1) Open up chat (or another activity)
 * 2) Go to the neighbourhood view and invite another XO user
 * 3) Go back to chat and wait for them to appear
 * 4) If the other XO user is looking at their "Home view", they'll see a colored chat icon
 * 5) When they click on it they'll join the chat session

Summary
The Chat activity will provide a simple interface for collaborative discussion, be it between two individuals or among a group as large as an entire classroom. While a lightweight and "impermanent" chat will be provided in a layer above all activities and the various mesh levels, this activity devoted to textual communication will keep detailed records of the conversation within the journal and provide a means of searching through the conversation to locate important comments.

** Text & Image    **
The Chat activity will take advantage of both the keyboard and the resistive trackpad technology on the laptops, allowing the conversation to evolve with both text and image.

** Iterative Chat    **
In addition to supporting both text and drawing, the Chat activity will encourage conversation and iterative process by providing a "pull" button for each entry. When a child clicks this button the content of the chat bubble - both image and text - get pulled into the input region, allowing her to alter or append both text and image. When the modified drawing or text becomes part of the conversation, it enters the stream as a new bubble, preserving the previous comments and drawing iterations. When pulling text into the editing region, it is "pasted" into the region in the normal fashion: over a selection or at the cursor location. Images, on the other hand, will be pasted in place above any currently existing drawing.

** File Sharing    **
The Chat activity doesn't explicitly expose a means for file sharing. This results from the fact that the entire Sugar UI is designed around the idea of collaboration, providing a layer above every activity for sharing images, links, and documents. This layer can be used in Chat, or in any activity, to share documents with the activity participants.

** Searching    **
The edit toolbar should provide an easy method to search for a string of text within the conversation, quickly jumping to chat bubbles that pertain to the search. Optionally we could have a filtering system which allows one to view only bubbles containing images, or all bubbles for a specific individual.