[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Jim Simmons]

Gary,

I was thinking myself that enhancing Get Internet Archive Books to
deal with local zip files of books as well as the Internet would be a
possible approach.  Currently GIAB produces and can be resumed from a
Journal entry but does nothing with it.  I might change that so it can
be resumed from a file of MIME type application/zip.  If it is resumed
from that it would check the Zip file for the catalog XML file and
build a user interface using that.  Maybe there would be a toolbar tab
named "USB" for this interface.

Resuming from a thumb drive does not present any security problems,
and I'd only read it, not write to it.

James Simmons


On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 23 Jul 2009, at 18:28, Gary C Martin 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
>
> Just to be clear, this is the behaviour since the data-store (and Journal?)
> re-work from Tomeu. I just ran the same test on an 0.82.1 release and had
> some different results:
>
> - I could rename, add tags, favourite and add descriptions; but this would
> appear as a duplicate entry on the stick next time I mounted the device. It
> would fail to start, but the old unchanged version would still be listed and
> would still work. Seem to remember this as an old indexing bug and part of
> the reason for the need to re-work the data-store to be robust.
>
> - resuming a pdf from the stick would view it in Read correctly but not copy
> the file over to the local data-store. When closing Read, it would then
> display a "keep error" (likely as the old data-store couldn't deal correctly
> with writing to external media).
>
> So, if you're looking to support deployments unwilling or unable to upgrade
> Sugar (likely a very large slice I'd imagine). This looks like you will need
> to bake your own Activity solution :-(
>
> Random thoughts. Both old and new external media support allows for starting
> an .xo Activity bundle. The Activity is installed and started. So you could
> extend the Get IA Books Activity to have a thumbnail view and have it check
> an external media device for a local archive format of some kind. Then just
> distribute a USB stick with the .xo bundle and the local archive of book
> content. Get IA Books Activity could then be launched, if found would
> default to the local archive, then any chosen books would be saved to the
> Journal.
>
> Both old and new external media also support for hiding files with the
> leading "." (dot) character, so you could potentially hide the archive
> structure from the Journal view to prevent kids from clicking on it, just
> showing them the Get IA Books Activity icon.
>
> One unknown spanner in the works to test for, is what access restrictions an
> Activity might hit trying to arbitrarily read from an external media device,
> haven't had to do this myself.
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>