<div dir="ltr">Just a comment ... I have in the past been one to criticize "coloring within the lines" ... but I have learned that this activity is beneficial for young children as a way to develop fine motor control, needed in handwriting and other activities.  So not something to treat as a negative in the right context and as long as it isn't used to stifle creativity of expression.<br> <br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Eben Eliason <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eben.eliason@gmail.com">eben.eliason@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="Ih2E3d">On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 2:57 AM, Brian Jordan <<a href="mailto:brian@laptop.org">brian@laptop.org</a>> wrote:<br> </div><div class="Ih2E3d">> This is One More Thing that would be a lot simpler and extensible with<br> > a more flexible journal/datastore (meaning storing Pictures, Audio,<br> > Video, Data [csv files], etc in a way that can be shared between<br> > activities). It seems to my uninformed self that, presently, the<br> > activities are constraining the output. (Disclaimer: I haven't gotten<br> > that deep into journal/datastore programming yet). I copy Eben... a<br> > couple sentences on where thought on this is headed? (there's also a<br> > video I took of discussion this... I'll forward when I find it)<br> <br> </div>This is one of the goals behind the new Journal/DS.  Right now,<br> entries are stored, more or less, as blobs which contain the "object"<br> (file) and the "state" (metadata).  (This is exacerbated by the fact<br> that we don't currently preserve the metadata across reboots, which<br> encourages developers to incorporate it into their entry blobs) We<br> realized rather quickly that, while this makes things nice while<br> working within a given activity stream, it does indeed limit the<br> ability to use stuff from one activity in another activity, or to<br> interact with the outside world.  In the new Journal, the object and<br> the metadata will be kept distinctly separate, so that the .png file<br> that is "My Painting" is pure and clean, regardless of my currently<br> selected tool, color, zoom level, and other info about the particular<br> instance of Paint I created it in.<br> <br> The revised import dialog (great work on this so far, Tomeu (and<br> Simon)!) will make it really easy for activities to build buttons<br> which pull in object of various types directly into their activities.<br> The vision for the clipboard also includes text and image previews,<br> custom icons, setting of titles (so the photo of a shark I clipped<br> from wikipedia is titled "shark.png" instead of "image clipping"),<br> etc.  This richer system, along with better support for drag'n'drop<br> both in the OS and in all activities, should help to make Sugar a<br> richer environment for sharing objects.<br> <font color="#888888"><br> - Eben<br> </font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">_______________________________________________<br> Its.an.education.project mailing list<br> <a href="mailto:Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org">Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org</a><br> <a href="http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project" target="_blank">http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project</a><br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>"The water won't clear up 'til we get the hogs out of the creek." -- Jim Hightower<br> </div>