[Sugar-devel] journal concerns (was Re: Planning for Weds - Tux Paint, Conozco Uruguay, Memorize with Speak)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 09:07, Albert Cahalan<acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Caroline Meeks writes:
>
>> the 3rd graders. They are the ones who
>> would test out these three activites.
>>
>> I want to check in on the current status I think it is:
>>
>> 1. Tux Paint - Waiting for it to save to the Journal
>> before we let the kids use it
>
> Last I checked, the Journal interface...
>
> a. required piles of custom D-BUS code (very painful to do)

This hasn't been a problem for other developers.

> b. was being changed

Same as above.

> c. would make the kid-friendly picture browser impossible

How so?

> d. would cause performance-sucking data copies

Doesn't seem to be a problem for Paint, in which way is TuxPaint more
exigent performance-wise?

> e. wouldn't provide interoperability anyway
>
> I'd better elaborate on that last item. Tux Paint maintains
> some metadata for each image. It's normally kept in extra files.
> For example, 20081009200559.png uses 20081009200559.dat containing:
>
> chicken
> 0 0 0
> c255 255 255
>
> This stuff is really internal to Tux Paint; it shouldn't be showing
> up in some keyword/label/tag search. There is also a thumbnail.

Activities can store such info in the properties as they want. The
Read activity, for example, stores the current page number and that
isn't displayed anywhere in the Journal.

If you put the thumbnail in PNG format in the preview property, it
will be displayed in the journal.

> There are some possibly neat and tidy solutions that I hope to
> investigate, involving private PNG tags. The typical solution is
> to wrap files in a *.zip archive, which I guess Etoys will claim.

Don't know if Etoys still claims to be able to open zip files, but in
any case Sugar will open by default an entry in the activity that
created it.

> Anyway...
>
> Even on desktop Linux, Tux Paint uses a private sandbox.
> IMHO, it's not a bad thing that Tux Paint allows kids to find
> back their work. I'm really not sure why a kid is expected to
> be able to navigate 100 files all named "Tux Paint image" and
> all having the exact same icon, especially when all sorts of
> other cruft gets mixed in and the scrolling lags **way** behind.
> Seriously, how exactly would the Journal be an improvement?

If you are able to name drawings in the TuxPaint's sandbox, then you
are also able to do so in the journal entries.

Regards,

Tomeu

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