[IAEP] Library Activity

[James Simmons]

Aleksey,

I've read over your latest Activities/Library document and it looks 
good.  There is one useful feature that Calibre has that your spec 
lacks, which is the ability to launch a viewing application once you 
find the book you're looking for.  I would expect this feature to work 
on texts in the local Journal only, not on texts in someone else's 
Library.  I would also desire it to be intelligent about which viewing 
application it opens.  By this I mean:

1).  MIME type of text/plain would be opened by Read Etexts.  The 
Journal makes you choose between Read Etexts and Write for this MIME 
type.  If you just click on the icon the Journal will pick one of these 
Activities and load it.  There is no way to tell the Journal entry which 
one to use by default or which one to use for a given Journal entry by 
default.  This makes reading Gutenberg etexts much more difficult than 
it should be.

2).  MIME type of application/zip *could* be opened by one of three 
Activities:

* View Slides
* Read Etexts
* Etoys

Again, in the Journal there is no way to specify which one should be 
used by default for a given Journal entry.  You have to remember to 
choose the correct Activity from a special menu each and every time.  So 
when we're thinking about tags there should be a tag to specify which 
Activity to use to open one of these Journal entries.  After you've 
specified this you should be able to open any book in your Library with 
one click.

Read Etexts works with text files contained in a Zip file because you 
cannot use the Browse Activity to create a Journal entry from a plain 
text file.  Browser will simply load the text file as if it was a web 
page.  Browse will let you download a Zip file to the Journal, and this 
is a format that Guitenberg can provide.

View Slides uses Zip files containing multiple image files, which may or 
may not be be in subdirectories.

I have no idea what Etoys does with Zip files, but I suppose there 
should be a way to indicate that by default a given Journal entry in the 
Library should be opened with Etoys.

3).  MIME type of application/pdf and application/djvu should be opened 
with Read.

4).  Opening with the fbreader Activity should be a choice for 
everything else.

Since you're the one writing this Activity I'll let you decide what 
version of the Activity would provide this function.  I do think it is a 
necessary feature, because what is the use of a nice, organized, 
sharable Library if you have to go back to the Journal to read one of 
the books in it?

James Simmons


Aleksey Lim wrote:
> On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 04:12:39PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>   
>> Aleksey,
>>
>> It isn't clear to me what a "cloud of tags" is.  Is there a familiar  
>> application that does something like this?
>>     
> thanks to Martin,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
>
>   
>> I understand that users can tag things to suit themselves, but still I'd  
>> want to impose some kind of structure on the views.  When I started  
>> visiting libraries they had card catalogs for Author, Title, and  
>> Subject.  It was a good system, and every library used it.  You could  
>> create a lot of other indexes but they wouldn't get much use.  In the  
>> Calibre screenshot we had File Size, Publisher, Date, Series, and I  
>> could easily do without any of them.
>>
>> Considering that most users of Sugar are going to be children enforcing  
>> a minimum structure couldn't hurt.
>>     
> agree,
> at the end Library's functionality(at least on the paper:) grows
>
> I'm thinking about implementing two layers of UI.
> Another option - using presets of Library object, like
> * "Activities" for activities and objects that could be treated like
>   activities(for example .swf files)
> * "Books"
> * "All my objects"
> * etc.
> all these presets could have different sets of default UI elements
>
> But anyway, I think its a task for future Library versions.
>
>   

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