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

[Simon Schampijer]

On 08/10/2009 11:56 PM, Lucian Branescu wrote:
> 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.

So saving the current page, could be a button, like shown in the 
screenshot now. If we want to special case the SSB creation, it could be 
an option in the button palette.

The SSB can be installed to the system as well. We want maybe an install 
option in the alert. And maybe there should be an install option from 
the journal as well. Activities we install directly when downloaded, we 
could handle it the same way, with the SSB as well.

The entries could have a badged browse icon. To distinguish them from 
the rest of the Browse activity entries. When you click on an 'offline 
webpage' entry a Browse instance could be opened showing that entry. One 
could think about opening it in a new tab, when a Browse instance is 
already running, in the future.

One thing that needs thinking as well is the modifying of the SSB (other 
icon etc). Maybe an activity could handle that? Maybe an option in a 
develop activity?

Regards,
    Simon