[IAEP] Journal criticism

[Lucian Branescu]

I'm new to Sugar, so I may be horribly wrong.

But to me, the Journal seems more of an annoyance than anything else.
A lot of the work I see done is towards bringing back some of the
properties that regular filesystems have

What advantage does it have as opposed to a regular filesystem with
support for versioning and metadata? A filesystem would be more
compatible with existing software (which could just ignore the
metadata), at least.

2009/5/27 Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
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