This week, we started defining the toolkit for our user interface. Scotty and Steven are working on the technical details of gathering the necessary metadata. We ran through a few quick flow tests on the XO, and there are some intermediary steps to the process of transferring the book from the USB stick to the Journal that need to be considered to guarantee a seamless user experience. We want to make that transition as fluid as possible, and the metadata is a critical component in that process.

We also began building our graphical interface! Levi is developing an icon system to work with our categories (which we are still in the process of finalizing – much debate about that . It is not an easy task dealing with almost 20 categories of books that do not readily lend themselves to a symbol or pictograph. We developed a standard RDC cover in the meantime to give us a default image to use as the icons and user interface are developed and the collections are improved. We don’t want to rush this step in the process since building a visual language is such an important part of any user interface design and some of the categories or content may change. All is a work in progress and, ultimately, we will release the icon set and the user interface into the public domain (the books are already there .

We took a look at the basic design on the XO, and will have a few adjustments to make before we enter final production. We are considering usability within the current Sugar environment (i.e., using navigational methods already adopted as a best practice such as tooltips and dropdown menus) with the goal to make it accessible and friendly to children. Scotty and Steven are developing a plan to auto-generate the pages for the collection, and we are evaluating a couple of Ajax libraries to build out our final user interface. We are leaning towards script.aculo.us, simply because it plays nice with other JavaScript libraries on our web site.

Things should really start coming together over the next couple of weeks – we have a rollout plan, a deadline … Labor Day Weekend – The RDC Launch Party! … and will need to get busy soon writing our documentation and creating some necessary items to make it very simple to use our sticks with the XOs. Go RDC!