Monday, December 24, 2007

First impressions of the XO So Christopher Fahey's looking for an objective review of the XO computer's interface: Challenge: If You Can[base ']t Say Something Nice about OLPC[sigma] Frankly, it somewhat baffles me. In part, I suspect, because I'm coming from years of the usual computing UIs and underlying infrastructure. For example, I tried desperately to locate the Finder (or Windows Explorer) equivalent so I could pull a sample file off of a USB drive. Turns out the Journal is the center of all things XO, which requires a little leap of faith for me. Likewise, when you first fire the thing up, you get to enter your name and choose a color scheme for your icon/avatar. One and only one. Fine if it really is one laptop per child, but what if you're going to share? No way to create multiple users? Not that I've found. There's a wiki with plenty of information, much of it about how to load the latest builds of the OS, and the beginning of a user's guide. But it gave me a headache trying to navigate and glean useful information; imagine the frustrations of a Peruvian or Afghan teacher. The machine has now spent about 30 minutes total in the hands of my kids, who pretty much said, "Cool, Dad," and went back to playing games on the Macs downstairs. And at a friend's party last night the lone three-year-old took control and decided that the coolest feature is that you can spin the screen around. And around. And around. Whee! Presumably, someone with no prior computer experience will come to the XO without preconceptions. But I strongly suspect that a trained teacher will be required to get things started and direct usage. Oh, and the lack of support (planned for 2008) for WPA wifi security means I can't connect it to the internet just yet. I would set up a second access point with my old Linksys WAP11, but I can't find the right power supply. Perhaps a trip to Radio Shack on Wednesday will help. 5:02:57 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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