[Sugar-devel] (Ab)using the Journal for stuff that the user didn't do, create, or access

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 12:38, Martin Langhoff<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 6:18 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> The idea is that the journal would have an actions view that would be
>> closer to what you refer to. Would contain actions that the user
>> carried and events that happened around the user.
>
> The Journal as Sugar's "documents" view is heavily influenced by the
> core concepts in the social constructivist approach -- and this is one
> of the best things we have in Sugar.
>
> When it works well, it is a "living document" of things done, so you
> can go back and work more on them, and also so you can go back and see
> what you did and (consciously or not) reflect on your own ways of
> doing (learning, exploring, fooling around...)
>
> So I have to agree with Daniel -- things that are not the outcome of a
> user action do not belong in the Journal. They belong to the home
> view.
>
> This is probably a challenge in itself too, as it starts getting
> crowded. The Home/Activities view already has 2... um... modes? This
> is confusing at the moment: users that find themselves with the list
> mode often think they are in the journal, and hit F3 repeatedly, and
> complain about something not working.
>
> I suspect there is a way out of that confusion that still allows
> various views/modes within the home view.
>
> Funny enough, when people started looking at options of what to do
> with 'ring' UI widgets, we saw lots of mockups that took advantage of
> the circle -- radial zones demarcated by backgrounds or limit lines,
> various zooming options, etc.
>
> IOWs, we probably have some good options to augment the home view,
> options that don't involve a list view, if we rummage through the old
> concept drawings :-)

I don't see where we disagree any of us, so maybe I'm explaining badly
myself. Let me try again.

I agree that the journal should be a journal, thus primarily about
actions and events and not about static pieces of data or code.

I also agree that library bundles could be represented along activity
bundles, this is what I referred by removing the artificial
distinction between data and code.

And less directly related, I referred to a new view in the shell for
the contents of the file system. This is not strictly needed by the
journal concept but has been shown useful as a stepping stone between
the journal and the underlying file system and for sharing files with
non-Sugar systems. Having this view allows us to have a real journal
without losing needed functionality.

Regards,

Tomeu

> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>



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