[IAEP] Journal criticism

[James Simmons]

Tomeu,

I've said this before, but maybe I can repeat it once more:

1).  I like the idea of the Journal.  I would not want to change the 
Journal proper to support putting items in hierarchies.

2).  Having said that, I don't always like the Journal Activity.  The 
biggest problem I have with it is it insists on making things that are 
NOT in the Journal kind of look like they are.  That's a big mistake.  I 
would prefer that SD cards and USB thumb drives that may have files and 
folders have a totally different user interface from the Journal 
interface.  The interface could be made with a Pygtk tree view.  You 
could copy a file into the Journal, as a Journal entry, or copy a 
Journal entry into a directory as a file.  The file would be named with 
the title meta tag plus a suffix based on MIME type.  Maybe some kind of 
Journal entries couldn't be copied this way, so copying would not be 
supported for them.

3).  Maybe there would be an option to use the SD card as expansion for 
the Journal.  If you had a 2 gig SD card you could specify that you 
wanted it treated this way, and from then on your Journal would be 2 GB 
larger.  This option would destroy whatever data was on the SD card to 
begin with.  If you didn't do this, the SD card would have the same 
interface as a thumb drive.

4).  For the Journal proper, I agree that a temporal view has value.  
However, in addition to that I'd like to sort by the Title meta tag.  
This would be a natural for etexts, because you could look for a book 
more easily if they were all in alphabetical order.  If you had a large 
library on your XO the temporal sequence would be annoying.

5).  When several Activities support the same MIME type (Zip files are 
BOUND to be popular) then there needs to be a way of specifying that a 
particular Journal entry should be resumed by a particular Activity by 
default.  You should be able to change that default at any time, but 
once changed you'd be able to open any entry with that default with one 
click.

Right now the only way to make a Zip file Journal entry open with the 
right Activity with one click is to make the Activity open the Journal 
entry with the Object Chooser, then save it back out as a new Journal 
entry.  Then the user deletes the original Journal entry.  We need 
something easier than that.

James Simmons