[Sugar-devel] Unified bundles

[James Simmons]

Wade,

One thing that I hope Unified Bundles will do is make ebooks more like 
real books.  In a real library you have books with pictures, books with 
just words, comic books, coloring books, and books with things that pop 
up when you open them.  All are recognizable as books.  On the XO it 
should be the same way.  Whether an etext is DJVU, or plain text, or 
images in a Zip file, or HTML with images and JavaScript animations and 
Flash it should be recognizable to the child as a book.  He shouldn't 
have to think about how he'll go about reading it.  He should be able to 
just launch it without being burdened with knowing how it is launched.  
This would mean you would have just one icon to indicate a book in 
either the journal or the activity ring, probably the one Read has now.  
The various viewers should try to be consistent, but may deviate when it 
makes sense to.  Some kinds of books with let you copy text to the 
clipboard or have text to speech with highlighting, and some won't, just 
like some kinds of books have pop-ups or have characters speak in word 
balloons and others don't.

I wrote my own Activities because I tried converting Gutenberg etexts to 
PDFs and didn't like the results.  I was hoping that Read would handle 
more formats than it does, and it was easier to make my own specialized 
Activities in Python than it would have been to make Evince plugins, 
etc.  I thought that in time somebody would make Read do more formats.

If the download counts from http://activities.sugarlabs.org are anything 
to go by my Activities are pretty popular.  I think that says more about 
the popularity of the formats they support than the quality of the 
Activities themselves, and I would guess it is adults who are doing the 
downloading.  Adults have been trained by Microsoft Office to use 
different programs for different kinds of documents, so using a 
different Activity for plain text files than you use for PDFs is 
something adults are willing to put up with.  A kid shouldn't have to 
deal with that unless he's creating his own books.

Maybe in the future Read Etexts and View Slides could become tools to 
actually create content, in the form of Unified Bundles.  A teacher 
could go to Gutenberg to get an etext in Zip format, load it into Read 
Etexts to have a look at it, then have the Activity create a new Journal 
entry which is a bundle.  She could then use the Journal to share the 
bundle with her class.

To the kids the bundle would be just a book.

James Simmons



Wade Brainerd wrote:
> Good question.. My proposal is that activities which don't allow the
> creation of brand new content (e.g. they require some initial content
> to be used) become Content Viewers which is a special case of
> Activity.
>
> As it stands, I'm not sure whether they need to be merged into Sugar
> or whether they can exist independently, with some sort of "This
> bundle requires the Read Content Viewer".
>
> My initial instinct was that they should be merged into Sugar.  But
> now, given the inspiring "Unified objects" thread, I kind of think
> they should be allowed to remain separate.
>
> -Wade
>
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 4:58 PM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
>   
>> Wade,
>>
>> Thanks for your response.  It clears up a lot now that I have a better idea
>> of the purpose of Unified bundles.  There is still one question I have,
>> which is what becomes of Activities in this scenario?  For instance, if you
>> have a bundle containing a PDF, what happens to the Read activity to make
>> that possible?  Does code from Read move out of the Activity and become part
>> of Sugar?  What's left in Read if you do that?  Or does Read go away?
>>
>> James Simmons
>>
>>
>>