[Sugar-devel] Accessing external media from within an activity (was: Re: Problem listing journal objects)

[Jim Simmons]

Sascha,

To clarify, the Journal entry for View Slides contains a Zip file with
image files in it.  I want to be able to create and update this Zip
file.  I want to add images to it, either from the Journal or from
thumb drives.  In .82 I could use one API for both.  I will also
rename and delete images inside my Zip file.  Finally, I will
sometimes extract images from my Zip file and create Journal entries
from them.  I will not extract files to anything other than the
Journal.

The idea of this is to create, organize, view and distribute
collections of images.  A teacher could create a collection of
painting images for an art appreciation class on her own computer,
annotate them, then share them with the class.  A student receiving
this collection may want to use some of the pictures in a Memorize
game.

It would be helpful to be able to use thumb drives and to know when
one has been mounted, or at least to be able to refresh the file list
and see all the image files currently available.  For test purposes I
downloaded a bunch of painting images from an art usenet group and put
them on a thumb drive.  This is a lot less tedious than copying images
to the Journal from Browse one at a time, so being able to work with
files created that way would be useful.

James Simmons

> Just as a reminder: The intended workflow for Jims activity seems to be:
> 1. Start activity
> 2. Plug in USB stick with photos
> 3. Select and/or manage(?) photo from within the activity
>
> Answering "use POSIX" is like "use a computer", it doesn't help getting the
> job done. If the answer is "we want the user to copy the photos to the data
> store first", that doesn't get the job done either, but it's a policy and
> can be catered for (i.e. documented).
>
> CU Sascha