[sugar] eBook ideas

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 20:10 -0700, Don Hopkins wrote:
> Samuel Klein wrote: 
> > A delayed response: I do think there should be a separate 'library' 
> > activity, and whether it is part of the browser or not, that is the right 
> > place to access "browse books" and "browse audio materials" and "browser 
> > [X] to download".
> > 
> > Perhaps on the XO, this activity is tied intimately with the object store,
> > and is an interface to it.  This kind of activity/interface should also be 
> > available to people not using an XO who browse to a library portal... that
> > version should run in a browser.
> > 
> > SJ
> >   
> 
> That sounds like a good idea: factoring out the Internet Archive
> library browser (and other library browsers) into a separate library
> activity, instead of building it into the eBook reading activity. 
> 
> The Internet Archive has an HTML and a ReST search interface, and the
> results can come back as RSS feeds. 
> I think it would be nice to provide an easy to use Sugar user
> interface for browsing and searching the library, instead of raw html
> in a browser. Can we easily plug the penguin tv RSS feed reader or
> another RSS reader component into the library activity? 
> 

That's possible yeah. Penguin TV is quite heavy and it probably doesn't
have the interface we want but... maybe it's possible to reuse it or
part of it to build what we want.

> I'd like to avoid a 1:1 mapping between mime types and activities, the
> way current web browsers work (or fail to work). 
> That way leads to nothing but madness and mime type hijacking. 
> When downloading a supported mime type, the user should have some way
> to choose which activity it's sent to, and easily setting the
> default. 

That's being worked on. The object type system is next on my list. The
plan is to allow to choose the activity to open the file with in the
journal or in the clipboard. I'm not sure what we want to do with
auto-opening though (Eben?)

Marco