[sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Persistent activity storage (Bert Freudenberg)

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 09:55:38AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
>Hi Michael et al,
>
>I thought that starting an activity from the Home View would start it 
>with no "state" preserved from the last time it was used.

>Starting it from a Journal entry would start it with the "state" of the 
>saved (kept?) instance, including any files that we worked on before.

What you describe is implemented today but that is not what was
designed:

   http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Designs/Activity_Management&oldid=112067#07

I'm simply saying that we should try more fully implementing the design
so that we can make an better decision about which interaction model is
superior.

>In the first instance it may be useful to preserve some "settings" or 
>"options" but probably not wise to always open with the same file.

Both 'resume' and 'clone a prototype' are useful actions; however, some
people (me, Walter, ...) think that 'resume' is a better default. 'clone
a prototype' is like 'new' but works better with user-editable templates
or examples.

>What kinds of persistence are we talking about here?

Persistence of the 'bottles' that Rainbow makes.

>Also, are there any activity launch time performance concerns? 

I have activity launch concerns (performance and otherwise) in many
other places, but not here.

> I want to make sure we don't slow down the launch time without a very
> good reason.

Well, how much risk and how much of Marco's, my, and Tomeu's time do you
think we should squander on supporting hacks to make activities launch
quickly? 

Michael