[IAEP] Read Etexts with offline Gutenberg catalog search

[James Simmons]

Tomeu,

Did some more work on Read Etexts last night and it's shaping up pretty 
good.  I may have something worth posting on Sugar Activities before too 
long.  Memorial Day is coming up.  If my wife works on that day that 
would give me a good opportunity to finish everything.

One thing I think I did right on this was to use a vbox to split my 
Activity window in half vertically.  The top half is the textarea for 
reading the book page or the help text.  The bottom half is the table 
for the results of the book search.  When the bottom half is hidden the 
textarea takes up the full screen (other than the toolbar).  This 
enables me to have a modeless interface.  I was thinking of making a 
similar table for View Slides where I could list out the Journal entries 
representing images and select one or many of them to include in a slide 
show.  This would be far superior to opening the Object Chooser each 
time to select just one image.

If you end up working on the object chooser, I have a notion for you to 
consider.  Not a request, just a notion.  The notion is, how about an 
object choosing widget?  Something you could put in a scroller and use 
in Activities.  You could create the object chooser dialog by simply 
putting the widget in a scroller and putting that into a dialog, along 
with OK and Cancel buttons.  Activity developers might choose to use the 
widget as an alternative to the modal dialog.  You could make a case 
that modal dialogs are a necessary evil that Sugar Activities should 
avoid whenever possible.

The widget code would be self contained, so an Activity developer could 
include the code in his bundle to support older versions of Sugar.

In any case, I'll look forward to your feedback on the new Read Etexts.  
I'm liking it pretty well myself so far.  I can create properly named 
Journal entries for a bunch of etexts in a few minutes, and open them 
from the Journal with one click.  This is a great improvement over using 
Browse to download them from the PG website.

James Simmons


Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> Sounds great, what I would like to do is to add buttons to the
> objectchooser for taking a photo, record a video clip and record audio
> to the object chooser, so all activities using the object chooser can
> also get those media from the input devices.
>
>   
>> The "growing one step at a time" is a necessity considering how little time
>> I have to do this kind of work.
>>     
>
> I think it's important not only because of our limited resources, but
> also because it allows for a more efficient feedback loop. We have
> many options open and is often hard to decide which way to go.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
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