[Sugar-devel] Design help needed for web applications within Sugar

[Lucian Branescu]

This a bit long-winded, but please bear with me. If you know my
project, skip to the end.

I've been working on Browse in the context of GSoC.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Webified
Here's my blog http://honeyweb.wordpress.com and you can get the code
from here http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/browse/repos/webified. I
can prepare an .xo bundle if needed. I've implemented Site Specific
Browser creation and 'save complete page' functionality for Browse. An
example of SSB is Mozilla Prism; Firefox has the option to save a
page, complete with resources.


Site Specific Browsers in Sugar are instances of Browse with a static
home-page and a few extra capabilities, like bookmarklets, userscripts
and userstyles (http://honeyweb.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/bookmarklets-userstyles-userscriptssort-of/).
The web site loaded inside an SSB works just like it would normally,
but it happens to be the default and it can be (easily) customised.
This works very well for GMail, for example. In fact, I use GMail
inside an SSB all the time (http://fluidapp.com). With Gears, you can
even work with GMail offline.

Saving a complete web page is useful for keeping a web page for
offline viewing, of course. But for web apps with behaviour that does
not depend on a having a network, they are similar in a way to SSBs.
This would work very well for things like Karma lessons (see Felipe
and Bryan's project http://karmaproject.wordpress.com/) and Paint Web
http://code.google.com/p/paintweb/.



Both ways produce a Journal object that can be run and opens a Browse
instance with the desired web page, but they are very different
technically. Both would be very useful and for different purposes, but
they have some overlapping usage.

How should these features be presented to the user? The screenshots on
my blog show the current situation.