[Sugar-devel] Unified bundles

[David Farning]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 4:52 PM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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.

To extend the analogy, think of a browser and web services.  An end
user doesn't want to care what a website is written in or what
gymnastics the browser must do to render it correctly.

Imagine a world in which a user has to first chose which browser is
needed to 'goto' a php base site.

david

> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
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