[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Jim Simmons]

Gary,

What Scotty wants is a listing that can be easily browsed, and which
shows image files for book covers.  The problem I have with USB
devices on the Journal is that they are listed in descending order by
the date and time they were created.  Even a few hundred books on a
USB stick isn't all that easy to manage.  (I have an SD drive with 2
GB worth of comic books and it really bugs me that they aren't in
alphabetical order).  Searching is fine if you know what you're
looking for.  In this case the kid might be asked by his teacher to
pick out a book from the "conduct of life" collection and do a report
on it.  In that case the kid really needs to be able to search the USB
drive as if it was a real bookshelf, look at the book covers, read
descriptions, etc.  What I had proposed would allow that.

The idea is to provide books to kids that don't have access to the
Internet, either because it isn't available or because of parental
concern.

James Simmons


On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> Just wondering. If I had a USB stick with 2,000 pdf, plain text, etext,
> djvu, epub etc files on it... if they are at least reasonably well titled
> file names (lets say at least title, author), then a child can:
>
> 1). pop in the USB stick
> 2). goto the Journal and select the external USB stick icon
> 3). search and/or browse the books by author / title
> 4). any entry they want can be dragged to their Journal icon
> 5). ...or clicking any object entry will both start it for reading and copy
> it into the childs Journal
>
> FWIW some find step 5 a limitation or design bug for Sugar, in that you
> can't work with files on external media that are larger than the free space
> you have left in your Journal. Step 4 could be better, as the icon for your
> Journal (appears in a bottom tray when additional media devices are
> present), is actually an XO kid icon, would be more logical to show the
> Journal icon I think. Step 3 clearly could be prettier but would require
> some way of generating live previews for the entries currently in view (and
> then you could use the proposed Journal grid view to view book covers).
>
> It's also worth noting that although directory structure of the external
> media is not displayed directly (Journal shows a flattened list of all
> files), the full directory path to the file is placed in its description
> field. This is all fully searchable data, so you could put all the Lewis
> Carroll books in a folder of that name, and that would be enough to allow
> you to query Journal for them.
>
> So just some well chosen directory names (by author seems sensible), and
> consistently well named files (i.e full title of book) would make quite an
> accessible solution. Perhaps if there's interest, we can polish some of the
> above steps to make it even smoother in 0.86?
>
> Regards,
> --Gary