Sophie, Tweak on the OLPC laptop

I just installed Sophie on my green machine. Sophie is a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book, is implemented in Squeak (just like my Etoys activity on the laptop) using Tweak as its UI framework (which is the original topic of my blog). Tweak is also the base for the next-gen Etoys.

Installation went pretty smooth. I downloaded the cross-platform zip file using the Web activity from Sugar
and unpacked it using the command line. The first start of Sophie failed, but after replacing the failing plugin with one from the pre-installed Squeak it started and worked. Yay!

This is an excellent example why it's a good idea to have a regular X11 installation on the kid's laptop: a lot of software will just work, even if it is not correctly integrated into the Sugar UI.

Michael Rüger of impara (a Squeak shop leading Sophie development here in Magdeburg, Germany) came over and made a little book, downloading two logos directly from the web (Sophie can do that!), adding a bit of text and color ... Tweak performance is not exactly blazing on the XO machine, I think we made the right decision to not use the Tweak-based Etoys but stick to the proven Morphic-based one. Of course one could optimize it a lot, but who has time for that? Anyway, it was useable - click the image to get a larger view:

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Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg

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