Scott's Blog

I just finished posting mm2s5 to code.google.com this weekend. It's a small Python utility to convert a FreeMind mind-map (.mm) file into an S5 presentation. It was a little hack that I put together to make presentations quickly and somebody else found it useful, so I decided to put it on the net. You can see an example presentation here and a picture of what that same presentation looks like in FreeMind here .

I asked for and got an OLPC to test and work on. My first impressions are very favorable. It's very small and cute and something that kids are immediately drawn to, because it's not adult sized. My 6 year old son has been playing with it on and off and I just saw him today explaining how to play on the laptop. I even overheard him saying that the laptop connects to other laptops which he must have overheard me mentioning to someone else. The keyboard is very small, but it's perfectly acceptable for two finger typing. My only complaint is that the space bar and enter keys have dead areas in it, but that ought to be fixed pretty soon. The biggest complaint from my son is the trackpad. He was almost brought to tears trying to use it. It was frustrating for him because he would try to move right and it would move left. Even build 303 seems to have that problem on occasion. I never had problems with it, but I'm more used to using a trackpad. It looks like he was st...

I've asked for and looks like will receive an BTest-1 OLPC laptop for development and testing. My son is working through letters and numbers so I'm looking on adapting a program for that. It should be very interesting seeing how he uses the laptop as my tester. Perhaps I can convince some of my colleagues at Google Brazil to contribute some time as well, it's a very exciting project.