[Sugar-devel] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Jim Simmons]

Scotty,

I think there is a method where if you have a Journal entry you can
tell Sugar to open it with the default Activity for that entry.  I
haven't tried to do anything like that yet.  It is important to copy
the book to the Journal though.  You can open a book from the stick
directly, but it won't save the page you stopped reading on, or let
you change the title, or take a screenshot of the last page you looked
at, etc.  My big gripe with the Journal is even though it cannot do
these things on a stick, the user interface suggests that it will.

There are many ideas floating around for improving the Journal, but
getting them implemented and installed on all the XO's is a big
undertaking.  If you can accomplish 90% of what you want by making an
Activity then that's probably a better way to go.

Since Deja Vu support is lacking in .82, and PDFs perform poorly,
another possibility is the .cbz format using View Slides to read it.
That performs quite well on the XO.  The difficulty will be creating
CBZs from Internet Archive books.  It's possible, and I describe how
to do it on the web page for View Slides.  It would take some doing to
convert 2,000 books.  Ironically IA provides books in a "flipbook"
format that View Slides could use as is, but the page images are too
small to be readable.  If they were just a bit larger they'd be fine.

Try reading "Jack and the Giants" as a PDF with Read and as a CBZ with
View Slides on an XO and you'll see what I'm talking about.

James Simmons

 Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Scotty Auble<scottymon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim, thanks for the blow by blow. The idea is really taking shape into
> a vision of how it should work! If there's a way, it would be great to
> change the part where the child must open the book from within the
> journal as it feels like a lot of "app hopping" to get to reading the
> book. Is it possible to open journal entries without going to the
> journal? If so, maybe our activity could save "links" to those journal
> entries? What do you think?
>
> Also, got your copy of Gary's message, thanks. He does raise some good
> points re expanding journal capabilities to allow "collection
> browsing" without installing. If that were there, we wouldn't even
> need the activity we're talking about as it would be a done deal. We
> should explore working with Sugar development to aim in that direction
> rather than create an activity.
>
> Finally, I have not yet found any robust Read support for djvu in
> Sugar v.82. I did get a file to open and display a book cover, but
> that's it so far. It's ok to have to use PDF on Sugar .82, since it
> does work but the performance seems to really be lacking - 20 secs for
> a page load! I understand djvu is 5-10 times faster so that's the way
> to go IMHO.
>
> I will copy these emails the IAEP list as you suggest. Meantime if you
> have other thoughts let's keep in contact.
> Thanks
> Scotty
>
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Jim Simmons<nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Scotty,
>>
>> The Journal entry that the Activity would create would be in the
>> Journal proper, and would not point to or in any way require any files
>> on the stick.  The Activity would work like this:
>>
>> 1).  The child inserts one of your sticks.  Sugar mounts it.
>> 2).  The child uses the Journal to change views from the Journal
>> proper to the stick.  He will see your bundled files, hopefully named
>> something more appealing to a child than "Conduct of Life".  He will
>> also see the Activity.
>> 3).  The child will use the clipboard to copy the Activity to his
>> Journal (unless he already has it).  He will then Resume one of your
>> bundles using the Activity.
>> 4).  The Activity will show a scrollable list of books.  The entries
>> in this table will be tall enough to hold the book cover thumbnail and
>> information on each book, at minimum title and author.  The
>> information about the books might be stored in a Dublin Core XML file
>> which the Activity reads and parses.  The child will select an entry
>> in this table and click a button in the toolbar of the Activity which
>> will copy that book to the child's Journal.  This will work somewhat
>> like Get Internet Archive Books does.  The child will see an
>> information dialog when the Journal entry is created.  He may then
>> choose another book to copy, as many times as he wishes, or exit the
>> Activity.
>> 5).  The child unmounts the stick from the Journal and gives it back
>> to the teacher.
>> 6).  The child opens one of his new books using the Read Activity.
>>
>> There was some talk about making Browse work with zipped up websites.
>> If you had that, you could give your files meaningful names like:
>>
>> The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain.djvu
>>
>> and maybe Browse could download them from the zip file into the
>> Journal.  But if it did the Journal would have a really ugly name
>> starting with file:// that the child would have to clean up.  You
>> would not get any metadata either, just the filename as part of the
>> title.  Plus Browse cannot do what I have described yet, although it
>> has been talked about as a future feature.
>>
>> The Activity I have described could be written so it would work on
>> Sugar .82, a big plus.  Of course you still have to verify good
>> support for Deja Vu in .82.  Or use PDF.
>>
>> I would recommend copying these emails to the IAEP list.  I am by no
>> means a Sugar expert and you may find others will have something
>> worthwhile to add to these discussions.
>>
>> James Simmons