[Sugar-devel] [FEATURE] Activity as a regular Journal Object request for inclusion to 0.88

[Aleksey Lim]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 02:54:49PM +0000, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:34:45PM +0000, Daniel Drake wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 22:16 +0000, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > While preparing new 0.88 features, I encountered some in consistence in
> > > "activities vs. activity bundles" case, so I'm going to reveal
> > > "Activity as regular objects"(see [1] ml thread) feature but make it
> > > less invasive in case existed user experience.
> > > 
> > > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Activity_as_a_regular_Journal_Object
> > 
> > I feel that this is quite a fundamental change to the Journal
> > philosophy. Until now, the Journal is something that record what the
> > user has done, and it only stores the work (or history) of the users
> > session within the activities. In tune with this, the Journal is empty
> > when you start for the same time. This would no longer be the case with
> > this feature.
> 
> Well, I'm sure we should start such rethinking sometime since we don't
> have any native sugar shell workflow for forking/changing activities
> (imho having such workflow could be very useful to encourage tweaking
> existed activities in the field). And we can start from small steps like
> proposed feature.
> 
> > I think this topic needs larger forward-thinking discussion. Personally,
> > I prefer the concept of the Journal for what it is now.
> > 
> > > The major reason for this feature is eliminating confusion when:
> > > 
> > >     * theres are activities(in Home view) and activity bundles(in Journal)
> > >     * user can remove bundle from Journal and activity will be preserved(and vise versa)
> > >     * activities could not have bundles in journal(were deleted or its a system wide activity), so user can't copy activity(e.g. to share it via USB stick) using regular shell workflow(Journal) and should be aware of stuff like Terminal 
> > 
> > I guess it depends on the UI, but I worry this would actually add
> > confusion. Users would be prone to accidentally deleting the activity
> > installation from their Journal when they think they are just deleting
> > some work they have done in that activity.
> 
> I guess it relates to another forkflow which is proposed by [2],
> bookmarks from [2] is just a set of objects(I think it could be useful
> e.g. having fast method to access to some tricky query or for sharing
> objects from bookmarks, to not share all objects), so user can
> delete/change object from bookmark or from full Journal View and that
> shouldn't confuse him(I hope) if he will keep in mind that he is
> working with the same object(but from different views) all time.
> In that case, having Home view(which is not "just another view") and
> Journal with bundles could be really confusing.
> 
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Journal_Plugins#Data_model

In fact it(user all time work with the same object but from different
views) is the same intention as [3](user all time work with the same
type of files out of sugar environment). 

[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Sugar_Bundles

-- 
Aleksey