[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Eben,

On 25 Jul 2009, at 02:24, Eben Eliason wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com>  
> wrote:
>> On 23 Jul 2009, at 21:36, Jim Simmons wrote:
>>
>>> Gary,
>>>
>>> What Scotty wants is a listing that can be easily browsed, and which
>>> shows image files for book covers.
>>
>> Yes, book cover images, is the big missing feature with current
>> Journal abilities when accessing external media (along with a Journal
>> thumb view, but hopefully that feature is coming).
>
> We should provide a way to populate the previews for the entries
> within content bundles. With this, and a grid view, we'd be in good
> shape.

The term "content bundles" is still pretty wooly for me. Are we  
talking zip files, perhaps with some formal structure?

>>> 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
>
> The Journal is spec'd to have sorting capability, and Tomeu has done
> some work toward this end. It should be possible to sort by date,
> title, type, and participants.

Hmmmm, yea... I'm so close to filing this as blocker BUG on 0.85.x to  
be honest :-)

It eats screen space, complicates the UI, drops all kinds of  
unexpected new view 'modes' on the user, and is close to useless  
unless you're an obsessive compulsive disorder type with an unhealthy  
addiction to titling everything with alphabetical sorting in mind. For  
the columns we have, it's about as useful an improvement for me as  
tying a sack over my head and pushing me in a swimming pool. Try it  
(0.85.x, not the swimming pool thing)!

Apart from tag filters (which already work great, but just needs to be  
more accessible/visible), sort by creation data seems to be the big  
Journal omission. This would be covered by your proposed action-view  
(which is inherently a creation ordered log of actions, as I  
understand). Right now you can't tell "what you did last week" because  
everything is sorted by modification date – if you so much as look at  
an entry, it jumps out of order to the top of the Journal.

>>> 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.
>>
>> The teacher asking students "to pick out a book from the 'conduct of
>> life'" is the easy case :-) The kid just types 'conduct of life' into
>> the Journal search filed, and just those books are listed. All that
>> the USB stick would have needed is for those books to be in a
>> directory called "conduct of life", or for that text to be part of
>> each books file name title. Like any real bricks and mortar library,
>> putting the books in some sort of order, up front, really helps the
>> punters in finding what they are looking for ;-)
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Yes, Journal type meta-data is not supported on external media
>> unfortunately (though that is a really tough problem to solve). I
>> guess you can make the argument for creating custom file layouts /
>> index that you implement in Journal (Ewwww), so that you can stick
>> book thumbs and metadata in known names/folders... But this is just a
>
> Oh. That's what I was suggesting above. I guess you're right. It would
> be very useful, though...
>
>> re-implementation of the data-store format from Tomeu, so no need to
>> re-invent or re-implement, just use the existing format for free!
>>
>> What this would mean for the Journal is allowing external volumes/
>> media to be flagged in some way so that the Journal would read and
>> display their data just like from the local Sugar data-store. I guess
>> this could be very low hanging fruit, you'd need to ask Tomeu... The
>
> We have discussed the idea of offering an "Extend my Journal" option
> for external media. It would be particularly useful for SD cards which
> can be more or less permanently installed. I think it's an intriguing
> idea.

I wasn't going for the "Extend my Journal" case here. That would  
indicate database/indexes that span multiple volumes and dealing with  
potentially missing volumes, and likely some smooth process as you  
fill up one volume to move over to using the next, etc. Sounds pretty  
complicated.

I was just suggesting that you could flag a media volume in some way  
so that Journal would treat it as a full fat, meta-data  journal  
entries, using the data-store format. It's great that the current  
default view of external media is cross-platform friendly, but it  
would be useful to be able to provide rich (Journal) content for USB/ 
SD distribution (fully tagged, titled, described, and with thumbnail  
previews).

>> flag could be something as simple as an empty root level file on the
>> volume named to indicate the volume is in data-store format and  
>> should
>> be treated as such.
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> +1
>>
>
> Eben

Regards,
--Gary