[Sugar-devel] Unified bundles

[James Simmons]

Wade,

Since two of my Activities are referred to by name in your proposal I 
suppose I should have an opinion on it, but I don't fully understand the 
proposal.  It sounds like you want to mix content and Activity in the 
same bundle.  So I guess you could write some sort of presentation using 
HTML and JavaScript and bundle it up like an Activity that contains a 
pointer to the Browse component needed to use it?

You mention that Activities like Read, Read Etexts, etc. don't create 
content, and thus are not like real Activities.  That is currently true, 
but lately I've been thinking of adding an Annotation feature to Read 
Etexts which would let the user attach notes to individual pages of the 
etext, as well as highlight passages with a yellow background (like 
marking up a book with a hi-lighter pen).  The notes and highlight 
coordinates would be stored in as a collection of objects which would be 
pickled and the pickle file would be stored in a Zip file along with the 
original etext.  So students assigned to read an etext could create 
their own content in the form of notes and highlights and share these 
with other students along with the text.

Acrobat allows you to annotate PDFs so maybe Read could support this one 
day too.

Originally Read and the rest did not appear in the Activity ring, and 
the only way to launch them was to resume a Journal entry with the 
supported MIME type.  This was a source of frustration to me because my 
own Activities make use of Zip files and there are at least three 
Activities that use them: Read Etexts, View Slides, and Etoys.  I was 
constantly launching Etoys when I wanted to launch one of my own 
Activities.  What I really wanted was to have my documents display the 
icon of the Activity needed to read that and launch that Activity when 
resumed.  Having the Activity launched from the ring and open that ugly 
dialog solved that problem for me in two ways:

1).  I never had to worry about opening the wrong Activity.
2).  When I exited the Activity it created a brand new Journal entry 
with my Activity icon, exactly how I wanted it to be.  I could delete 
the original Journal entry and resume the new one.

So yeah it's ugly, but it gave me a way to do something I really wanted 
to do.  What would be nice is if the Journal let you specify a default 
program to open a given Journal entry that otherwise would only be known 
by its MIME type.  I could download a Zip file from Gutenberg, then open 
the Journal entry information page.  Right now the launch button shows a 
menu of all the Activities that can be used to open it and you pick one 
from that menu.  But what if there was a similar menu that let you 
choose the default Activity, and once you chose it that icon was used 
for the entry in the Journal?  Zip files used in Etoys could be given 
the Etoys icon, slide collections the View Slides icon, etc.

I'm not sure why I'd want a content bundle that worked the way you 
describe "Slides Content Viewer" and "Etexts Content Viewer".  Etexts 
contained in Zip files can already be downloaded from Gutenberg, and 
slide collections are just images in a Zip file.  It takes some work to 
create these, but less than creating a bundle would be.

I could see the point of an HTML bundle.  Gutenberg has books with 
illustrations in HTML format and making a bundle would give you a way to 
read these offline.

James Simmons


> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 19:05:09 -0400
> From: Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Sugar-devel] Unified Bundles
> To: Sugar Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<7087c32a0904061605k424b1517v71eb47de85c47098 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi all,
>
> Aleksey finally prodded me (by creating an empty page and pointing me
> at it) into writing down my idea for Unified bundles which merges .xol
> and .xo files together.
>
> It diverged somewhat into a plan to recast activities which do not
> support actually creating anything as "Content viewers".  Those are
> ones like Read, Read Etexts, View Slides, Jukebox, etc.
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Unified_Bundles
>
> Comments welcome!
>
> -Wade