[IAEP] Library Activity

[James Simmons]

Aleksey,

I, too would be interested in what this will look like.  From your 
description it sounds like a way of grouping things (including texts) in 
such a way that you can share them with others without actually having 
them open, as long as the Library activity itself is open.  I would 
guess that if I had a collection of books on my XO that I could make the 
whole collection available for download even if I wasn't reading any of 
them.

Since you brought this up in response (more or less) to Caroline asking 
if there would ever be something like Calibre on the XO I was wondering 
if you planned to have features like Calibre has included in it?  What I 
was thinking of is a grid that lists book information.  You would have 
columns for Author, Title, Subject (or keywords), and you could sort or 
search the grid by any of these columns.  This would give you a way to 
organize a large collection of texts, something the Journal is ill 
suited to do.  The other Calibre-like thing you could do is to keep 
track of what format the text was in and open the correct Viewing 
activity when someone clicks a "View" button and the book's row is 
selected.  This is another thing that the Journal doesn't do very well.

Calibre uses Qt but I see that pygtk has a TreeView component that could 
be used to make the sortable grid.

Caroline mentioned having a collection of over 100 etexts in her copy of 
Calibre.  If you had that many texts on your XO the Journal would just 
list them in sequence by most recently added or read.  You could search 
on the title string but that's it.  It would be a mess to deal with.

The reason I ask is that I'm thinking I might try to write such an 
Activity myself, since it would try to address problems I've had with 
using the Journal since I got my XO.  If the Library activity would do 
much the same thing I wouldn't do it.

James Simmons


Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 15:51, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 10:39:52PM -0400, Caroline Meeks wrote:
>>     
>>> Yes!  In theory there are thousands of free books.  We need people to be
>>> able to experience that there are books available for Sugar when they try
>>> Sugar.
>>>
>>> I like the idea of hooking the readers to a library. I don't know how much
>>> work that is or who is available to do it now.
>>>
>>> Does anyone know where we are in terms of books on the activities portal?
>>>       
>> I've just initiated Library activity. The major ideas were:
>>     
>
> Seems like this activity has a lot of functionality. Do you have
> already a mockup of how the UI would look like? Something as basic as
> this would be enough:
>
> http://expressionflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/paper-mock-up.png
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tomeu
>
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20090504/4dc0f31c/attachment.htm