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

Gary C Martin gary at garycmartin.com
Tue Aug 11 13:58:33 EDT 2009


On 11 Aug 2009, at 08:17, Simon Schampijer wrote:

> 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.

Random thought, well not so random – blame Michael Stone if you don't  
like it ;-)

How about a Browse badged identicon?

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

I've been perusing the possibilities of identicons as an alternative  
to titles now that we plan to HIDE THE BLASTED THINGS IN A SUBMENU  
now ;-p But, this use may actually make more sense.

Regards,
--Gary



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