Hello! After a brief respite to organize a phenomenal art show and enjoy the changing seasons, we are back in action for the latest work from the Rural Design Collective! We learned from our demos that we gave at our Launch Party and have been ironing out a few bugs based on feedback.

After much deliberation, we have decided to package our previous summer work into a new tool called the “Collection Interface Generator” (genCollectionInterface), a python application developed by Scotty Auble. We think it is exciting in that it works on the XO plus it is accessible to any person interested in creating a localized collection of public domain books. For a sneak peek, you can check out the ongoing work we are doing in the UI Lab. The pages were generated using the program which made it easy to create of custom collection based on our UI work. The metadata for the tooltips came from a .csv metadata file that Steven McKenzie created using Internet Archive advanced search, and the covers were downloaded using the Open Library API. It is a work in progress – we will be tweaking the navigation and other UI details – but we think it is really starting to come together. Our release in October will be accompanied by documentation to explain the Collection Interface Generator, as well as additional information behind our overall concept and method which has developed over time during the 2009 Summer Mentoring Program.

Levi’s work on the icon collection is outstanding – he has developed a versatile set of pictographs that work in a broad range of visual settings. This is the hallmark of a strong icon set, and a great basis of images to release into the public domain. This will be documented along with our code.

The primary usability issue that we are encountering is how to load the DjVu books into the XO Journal as fluidly as possible. There is an interstitial step when the DjVu file is loaded onto the XO and transferred to the Journal that needs to be populated with metadata in order not to disrupt the user experience (you can see this screen here from the GIAB activity). One solution we are exploring is using the embeddable bookreader from the Internet Archive. This version of the bookreader works well on the XO and enables us to emphasize collections which is central to our theme – the only drawback is that it uses JPEG2 files which was not the format we agreed upon for the SoaS solution. We can provide links to the books at the Archive as an alternative format, however, for users with an Internet connection. We will be solving that problem in the weeks ahead – Stay tuned!

The big news this week – we are getting set up for our Second Annual Launch Party (which is essentially a fun way for us to demo all of the cool work we have been doing over the summer)! We will be demonstrating our work with digital books, plus creating a few analog specimens in the process. The event will take place at our headquarters on 246 Sixth Street in Port Orford, OR, over Labor Day Weekend. If you are in the area, please drop by. It will be fun!

The primary agenda item for this #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday was syncing up on “The Sugar Solution.” As we reported last week, we were thinking that modifying the GIAB activity might be the best route to go – but as we delved deeper into the problem, we discovered that offering a straight-forward HTML/CSS solution in the XO default browser from the SoaS stick itself solved all manner of technical problems. For one thing, it does not overload the Journal with the entire index of the bundle. It also enables us to repurpose the design solutions that we are already addressing in our web user interface. Recycling is good, even on the web! We still think that the idea of building this into Sugar is a “Very Good Idea (TM)” and should be pursued … and we plan to look at it in the future.

We are also taking a look at our overall collection. We want to maximize the distribution of material throughout categories that may be of interest to kids. We currently have categories that have 800+ items that may (or may not) hold a child’s interest. We would prefer to have more categories available in this sample collection. We are not librarians (as we mentioned going into this), so we are going to invite some of our area experts to participate in possibly helping us polish the basic material. We also have had a very generous offer of over 600+ new digital books for our target collection that are not available in the IACL. We are working out the details, so more news on that as it develops. We will need to fold those books into our existing categories, and perhaps even add a few more to our existing collection. Everything will be available via the web, either through us or through the original source, but the stick has limitations. Our current limitations are 8G.

Ideally, we want to automate the process of creating customized bundles – but that is another challenge to be met on another day!

This week, the RDC indulged a bit, and spent #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday tinkering and upgrading our XOs to Sugar 8.2.0. We encountered a bit of difficulty upgrading directly to Sugar 8.2.1, but were successful with an earlier build (767). A couple of the laptops we delivered to the local area were two years old (part of the initial G1G1 campaign) and running the original version of Sugar, so they were definitely due an upgrade.

Two more local laptops were retrieved belonging to local families. Many thanks to Nathan Malamud and Vilma McCutcheon for contributing their laptops to our project. Nathan is our lead beta-tester and videographer for our 2009 summer program. Vilma is an original “Friend of the Rural Design Collective,” and was a Bookmobilista when the Internet Archive BookMobile made its maiden voyage to Oregon in 2007. We have a pretty cool announcement to make relating to that in the next week or so …

And speaking of “Friends of the Rural Design Collective,” we want to welcome Roy Rousseau to the club. Roy has kindly provided us with the funds to purchase our sticks for the Sugar-on-a-Stick part of the project. Thank you, Roy! We will be announcing more friends over the coming weeks.

In other news, Levi is working on the web interface for the IACL-4-OLPC collection (and we are currently brainstorming a better name for our bundle, so consider “IACL-4-OLPC” a code name), while Steven is going the extra mile on the upgrade front, and souping up a couple of the XOs so we can experiment with EPUB. This will require an upgrade to Read 7.0, which was just released this week by Sugar Labs. We can’t wait to give it a whirl!

Greetings! We had a great #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday – we successfully downloaded our target collection of books in DjVu format, and took a close look at the current state-of-the-art in bundle creation and content collections at http://wiki.laptop.org/. We realize that what we are trying to do is somewhat ambitious, so we are trying to manage our own expectations.

The first order of business was registering our developer keys with the OLPC. We want to upgrade our current base of XOs to support the DjVu format, and it appears we need to upgrade to Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) .84 to improve performance (hat tip: James Simmons and Sayamindu Dasgupta). We will be updating several of our OLPC laptops to support this feature. We are currently conducting research to see if there is any way to auto-update the XOs that boot from the sticks to make integration of the DjVu format into the default Read.Activity easier.

We also spent some time setting up our XO Computer Lab at 246 6th Street (photos forthcoming!) so we can start sharing our work in progress with visitors to our studio. Today marks the designated halfway point in our program, but we are having so much fun working together and coming up with so many cool ideas that we decided to extend our own deadline until October so we can take our time and deliver a great product … plus share our discoveries with our friends in the area. We still have several laptops to retrieve – and given this is the summer months that makes this aspect of the project quite difficult! Our fallback plan is to make sticks for all 12 laptops (six granted from the OLPC, and six we donated in our local area) – but ideally we would like to meetup with everyone nearby with an XO to share our work and show them how to work with the collection.

So, our plan moving forward is to bundle the IACL collection in as many usable formats as feasible, providing a plan for graceful degradation – we know that the PDF format works in the current XO-1 bookreader on default, DjVu requires an upgrade to an XO-1, and EPUB is the wave of the future. We are starting work on mockups for a web user interface for the IACL collection, plus helping Steven map out a plan for the release of his auto-downloader program.

The excitement continues at the RDC!

We all agreed that the best plan is to deliver the bundles as DjVu so we can use the native bookreader (with some possible enhancements – more on that later), but create a target collection of 20 or so books as a research experiment for future development with EPUB. So, Levi and I are currently building a subset of those books that are an accurate representation of the different formats popular for children’s books (heavily illustrated, large type, poetry, etc). Then, we plan to experiment with mark-up. These books will be culled from our target IACL collection. EPUB is not fully supported at this time in the XO Read Activity – but we want to be ready when it is!

We are on target for our proposed deadline, Labor Day Weekend – you can see a very rough overview here – we have a more detailed production schedule that we will be posting soon.