(photo by Sugar FOSS Manual)

I'm going to try to post more about our progress as we get Sugar on a Stick ready for prime time. I'm going to try a sweet and sour formula

Record - http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081

I played with Record on my iMac today.

The Sweet:

• Video worked on my iMac

The Sour:

• Audio doesn't work yet
• Video quality isn't great - but alsroot thinks he knows how to fix that!

Why should we care?

Lots of people including a teacher in Oregon have told me that Record is one of the most popular activities with kids.  It allows them to create video and audio content and that is the power to communicate in the 21st Century.  I wanted to find out if it would work off the XO and although clearly we need to test more hardware I was pleased that my first test was Yes!

I also played around with local collboration.  I did this by taking the jabber server name out of the network setting.

The Sweet:

• Collaboration works, including sharing activities, when you are physically attached to the same wired hub.
• From FOSSVT I know it works when you are connected to the same wireless hub

The Sour:

• Just being on the same LAN doesn't currently allow collaboration.

Why do we care?

Bandwidth is definitely a concern in schools. Even though the vast majority have internet access the speed is often not what we are used to at home.  As we add more computers and make the computers more useful this is going to be more of an issue.  Last summer I had a school in an urban area turn us down for pilot because they didn't feel there was enough internet bandwidth.

One of the cool things about Sugar is if everyone is connected to the same hub they can collaborate without a jabber server and without even using or having an internet connection. This can be very sweet when you have a lot of people using computers and the internet is a trickle.