[IAEP] [sugar] Narrative.

[Gary C Martin]

On 11 Oct 2008, at 16:34, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:

> What I wish for is that Content bundles were not second-class
> citizens.  The entire Home View is devoted to presenting Activities
> for launching (or deletion).  But Collections currently are
> presented only within the left-hand panel in Browse.  To be viewed,
> they have to be "downloaded" by Browse to Journal, and then manually
> "launched" (from Journal).  [Deleting of Collections from the panel
> shown by Browse is done only with manually issued CLI commands.]
> Activities are "verbs".  Collections are "nouns".  Sugar should make
> the getting_to/using of "nouns" as easy as that of "verbs".

There seems to be two competing paths running, I'm not sure if one  
will win out over the other.

1) Content bundles are distributed and installed into the default home  
page library. No way to manage these in Sugar once installed (have to  
drop to a command line and know what you're doing).

2) Content is being shipped in an Activity build from a minimal Browse  
template (hopefully sharing as much code as possible). The Wikipedia  
slice and Help are examples in this direction. They can be managed  
within the current Sugar GUI, just like any activity. They are also  
visible (or can be) from the home view. They allow custom icons for  
the content to be accessed. They allow customisations via the Activity  
interface to improve access to information in a Sugar HIG way.

You can probably tell, I'm slanting towards option 2 ;-) and doing  
away with all the extra engineering/resources needed to keep  
supporting option 1. The main benefit of option 1 seems to be down to  
getting any extra features that get added to Browse for free, though  
that also means you get features you may not want***. As long as there  
is a Browse like Activity helloworld template, content creation  
wouldn't be any worse than trying to get content builders jumping  
through the library bundle requirement hoops.

***If I wrote some JavaScript games and/or tools (i.e. spreadsheet  
seems a good case), I'd not want to distribute as library content; I'd  
want them to be peers of the other Activities, with equal control over  
their tool bars icons, palettes, and potentially sharing/collaboration  
features.

--Gary