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

[Eben Eliason]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 5:43 AM, Sascha
Silbe<sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 08:41:28AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>
>> The public API is the POSIX one, though I don't know how this will be
>> affected by future versions of Rainbow.
>
> I can't find anything regarding mount points in POSIX 2001. How do you
> expect Jims activity to discover them?
> Two ways come to my mind:
> a) parse /proc/mounts periodically
> Linux-only, time-wasting but future-proof
>
> b) use what the Journal is using internally, i.e. the Gnome way of the day
> cross-platform (as much as Gnome/Sugar are), event-driven, but likely to
> break on next release
>
> 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).

The way I saw this working would be to extend the object chooser to
allow multiple sources, including external media. Where there is
currently a Journal icon in the chooser, we would also show any USB
sticks and SD cards present, and these would be selectable (with the
Journal the default, of course). Any activity could then invoke the
object chooser to select objects from the Journal or from external
media, without the overhead of building their own UI. Once the objects
are loaded into the activity, they can be bundled up and saved as
desired.

We even have some preliminary design sketches for this feature:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Object_Chooser#04

Eben


> CU Sascha
>
> --
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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