[IAEP] Journal criticism

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 19:34, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree, and thought I was clear in my last email about this. In 0.84
has been work to make this possible, though isn't user visible at this
moment.

> 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.

This is part of the original vision but is another task up for grabs.

> 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.

Yup, we have mockups that add this functionality. n_tasks_up_for_grabs++

> 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.

Maybe open by default in the last activity it was open with?

Regards,

Tomeu

> James Simmons
>
>
>