[Sugar-devel] Journal feature request--more data in main display

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Eben Eliason<eben at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>> On 3 Jul 2009, at 10:01, Martin Langhoff wrote:

>>> Wishlist: "show files by size" filter or option? If the Uruguay
>>> experience is any indicator, a fact of life is that users after all
>>> *will* hit:
>
> Yes, exposing size in the main list might be worth considering.

I'm looking at the UI in Calibre, a Free Software personal document
database (home page calibre.kovidgoyal.net) that scans designated
folders, reads metadata from the files or from a server, and provides
a variety of views and sort options. It currently has an index of more
than 2,000 files on my hard drive. (I have a separate program for
cataloging my music files and maintaining playlists.)

I can enter text in a search bar, and get back any document that has
that text in any field. Columns are

o Title
o Author
o Size
o Date
o Rating
o Publisher
o Tags
o Series (Think course)

Calibre also provides individual and bulk conversion of e-book formats.

Journal could use all of those and more. Collaborators (total number,
or by name), something like a mime-type/Open With... menu, version
history, bookmarks.

>> Good point! Though arbitrary Journal sorting likely breaks many design
>> goals***,

I have heard otherwise for more than two years.

>> otherwise you'd have thought we would have the most basic of
>> features, sort by creation date, by now ;-)

Particularly if you were not aware of our painful shortage of
developers and the great long list of Things That Must Be Done First.
I'm impressed that we are as far along as we are overall, though
disappointed not to have a more useful Journal.

>> At the very least size taken by
>> an entry should be visible on the details view. Right now there is zero
>> indication other than just watching your total Journal grow in size via its
>> frame icon.

Title is what I miss most, but I would use most of the others
regularly and all at least on occasion.

>> ***Eben can you clarify this one? If locking folks into a 'view Journal only
>> by modification date' was an intentional design choice?
>
> Not at all. The proposed designs include a sort bar, which would
> function in the traditional fashion, but be sorted by date ("when") by
> default. See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal#03
>
> Tomeu has been working on using the standard GTK TreeView, so I think
> we're on track to add sorting by name, date, and participants (we need
> to decide what sorting by participants means...I think sorting by
> number of participants might be the useful choice, so that it's easy
> to surface the collaborative activities).

In a tree view, it would be useful to have an expandable list of
collaborators, sorted by name.

That and other sorted lists should be in correct language-specific
sorts in a suitable normalization, not a sort on raw Unicode code
points. For example, each language that uses accented Latin letters
has different rules for sorting them, and similarly for case and other
issues. ICU can deal with many of these complications. There is more
information at

http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation
http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation/faq

> If we expose file size in
> this list somehow, that would also be sortable.
>
> Eben
>
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>>
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