[IAEP] Library Activity

[Eben Eliason]

On the topic of libraries:

Something we have talked about in the past is a way for individuals to
share content they've created with others, and an obvious means of
accomplishing this task is to provide functionality of a "View Alice's
Journal" nature, by which Bob could view Alice's shared content. One
exciting approach to implementation is to publish this content as an
RSS feed, thus allowing anyone (including non-sugar users) with the
right URL to take advantage of it. (Other data formats could also
work, but RSS readers already exist outside Sugar, making it a nice
option. We also talked about how tags could be appended to the feed
URL in order for kids to publish separate streams of content)

A corollary to this idea was that we could support other forms of
content libraries (other than individual Sugar users), each with it's
own feed. The server could expose some itself, but perhaps anyone
could publish these feeds. They could also have a representation
within the Neighborhood view, and in essence behave like a
persistently shared activity which anyone could access at any time.

I haven't thought all of this through in detail, but I thought I'd
throw it out there with the library discussion, since there might be
some interesting solutions in that space.

Eben


On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 2:54 PM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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