OLPC Gearing Up for Prime Time

Hardware Upgrade has an interesting article on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and its roadmap for the immediate future. With its new interfaces, ship dates and commitments it seems OLPC is ready for the world.

From the article: To achieve its goal of transforming the learning process, OLPCs will come with a slim and unique version of Linux that is geared towards education. Instead of the conventional windows and files approach, the home screen of these computers will be centered on a stick-figure icon. A white ring surrounding the stick-figure will display all programs that the student is currently running. The desktop (or "neighborhood" as the OLPC project terms it) also features a black frame that displays additional icons. At the core of the XO interface, developers are now announcing the first details of Sugar, the OLPC Human Interface. Sugar provides chat and sharing functions for the core applications featured on the OLPC. Christopher Blizzard, a lead developer for the OLPC project, emphasizes "We want this interface to be social. This means that kids can communicate in every app that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating."

Read more here...