[IAEP] Concrete feedback

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 8:37 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 2:56 PM,  <nanonano at mediagala.com> wrote:
>>>Walter Bender wrote:
>>>The eventual transition to GNOME 3.0 and PYGI will make a big difference in
>>> our ability to support more interoperability as well.
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> This is a very good news, Thanks, Walter!
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>>Walter Bender wrote:
>>>In any case, concrete feedback and criticism is welcome.
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Concrete Feedback:
>>
>> The journal is always full of garbage, hundreds of empty entries:  is there
>> a possibility to "CLEAN" the JOurnal?, or much better, that the programs
>> won't write empty entries?
>
> Quip: Thank goodness the only problem we have is Journal spam.
>
> Seriously, this has been an issue we have gone back and forth about
> for quite some time and I am afraid that our attempts to find a
> one-size-fits-all solution have not been successful.
>
> In the early days of Sugar, the default behavior upon launching an
> activity from the Home View was to launch a new instance, which ended
> up with a Journal entry associated with that activity. This was
> seemingly fine for Write, but pretty annoying for Terminal or Tetris.
>
> We turned it around about two-years ago such that the default behavior
> is now launch the most recent instance by default. This has in my
> experience almost entirely eliminated Journal spam, but we have had
> complaints that it is too difficult to launch a new instance (you need
> to use the hover menu and scroll past the list of most recent
> actions). I had proposed (but never wrote the patch) to make "new
> instance" be at the top of the list rather than the bottom, which I
> think help quite a bit. Still, the debate continues.
>
> We have discussed adding to the activity.info file an indication as to
> whether or not an activity should launch a new instance by default,
> but this idea has generally been disparaged as being too confusing:
> different launch behaviors for different activities.
>
> [I am curious which launch behavior you are working with, as I don't
> understand how launch-most-recent by default would result in Journal
> spam.]
>
> ----
>
> In a separate thread, Ana just proposed a few other ideas, which I
> will discuss as part of that thread:
>
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-June/013521.html
>
> thanks.
>
> -walter
>
>

If it seems I deliberately by-passed your suggestion below, that was
not my intention. I do think it would be good to allow an activity to
"abort" its Journal entry in some way, but I think that the bulk of
the Journal spam problem is associated with launching issue.

regards.

-walter

>>
>> Empty entry = when a kid opens "Browse", and he closes 10 seconds later, it
>> is useless that entry.
>>
>> If the kid uses "Write" for more than 15 minutes, probably he wrote
>> something useful.
>>
>> For example , If the kid opens "Write" but he don't write anything, that
>> entry would not be save on the journal.
>>
>> ANother example: Programs that are not well "sugarized", they save lots and
>> lots of useless entries on the journal.
>>
>> The problem is not the space, those entries don't occupy nothing. The
>> problem is the amount of entries.
>>
>> TOO MUCH INFORMATION = NO INFORMATION
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> Paolo Benini
>> Montevideo
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org