[IAEP] Library-1 Feedback

[James Simmons]

Aleksey,

I was eager to try your Library activity but I couldn't get to it until 
last night because my XO is running .82.  I had to use SoaS to bring it 
up.  I have to say it's a good first effort at this and I was 
impressed.  I think it will be a valuable addition to Sugar.  Now the 
feedback:

1).  There is a bug in the Description field when you View Details for a 
Journal entry.  I found this out when I placed a Description for Volume 
9 of the Works of Jules Verne.  The description read "Off on a Comet!", 
the name of the novel in Volume 9.  After that it seemed like *every* 
Journal entry had that description.  So that needs checking out.

2).  I like the tagging mechanism pretty well, and I like that there is 
always an attribute for Author plus any number of tags that can be used 
for any purpose.  I was surprised that the "Tags" do not seem to be 
stored in the "tags" meta data in the Journal.  I had modified Read 
Etexts to store the author name of a downloaded book in that field, 
thinking that when the Library activity was ready all the downloaded 
books would be pre-tagged.  It didn't work that way.  I still like the 
idea of having books downloaded through Read Etexts be pre-tagged with 
at least Author, and possibly things like Subject, Language, etc.  I'll 
have to look at the source of your Activity to see how to make that 
possible.

3).  In a previous email I confessed to not knowing what a "tag cloud" 
was.  Now that it has been explained I've been seeing the damned things 
everywhere.  I even saw one at a meeting for my own company.  I like 
yours, with some reservations.  My problem is you use the Activity 
bundle id as a tag.  If I have a Library full of downloaded ebooks I'd 
expect the largest tags to be the author with the most titles, the 
subjects with the most books, maybe if I had comics in there I would 
have a big tag saying "Comics".  In your cloud the biggest font will 
always be for the bundle id for Read Etexts.  I can already filter the 
Journal so it only shows Read Etexts entries, so I don't really need to 
do that for Library.  Personally, I'd leave these bundle ids out of the 
cloud.  I notice you also have MIME types in there, or at least I saw 
the word "zip".  I wouldn't think that those would belong either.

4).  In previous emails I had wished for a way to mark individual 
Journal entries so they would open by default with either Read Etexts or 
View Slides.  Over the weekend I learned a lot about how Journal entries 
are created and realized that I didn't need the Journal to do this for 
me.  My Activities could do this for themselves, while still allowing 
other Activities to open their Journal entry by MIME type.  Your 
Activity lets me organize my Journal entries in ways the Journal can't, 
making a lot of the discussion we had about the Journal last week moot.  
I'm looking forward to the version of your Activity that runs on .82.

5).  I know this version doesn't support sharing yet, but I'm curious 
how you will indicate that a Journal entry is eligible to be shared.

6).  I think this Activity will need a Tutorial of some kind built into 
it.  I don't think a person seeing this Activity for the first time will 
understand what it is for and how it works.  Your user interface is OK.  
It's just the idea of the Activity is a bit sophisticated to be grasped 
by a first time user.

James Simmons