[Sugar-devel] Remove the naming alert in 0.86

[Gary C Martin]

On 5 Sep 2009, at 12:53, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 13:46, Benjamin M.
> Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>>> I also think that improving the default texts will improve greatly
>>> this issue. Anybody wants to tackle it? Maybe for a reduced number  
>>> of
>>> activities at first?
>>
>> Ah, but what should it say?
>
> I think that the best automatic title will be activity-dependent.
> Activities can already set any title they want in the write_file()
> method, but should respect the title_set_by_user property.
>
>> How about "Change this title to a description of this Write  
>> Document!"?

Ewwww no thanks!! :-)

> That's interesting, though has its drawbacks.

Drawbacks, are that many will still choose to not edit the name, and  
Journal will fill with this junk text when ever they don't bother (I  
usually only edit a name if I think the content is of future use).

The auto-title needs to be smarter, more useful, not more annoying ;-)

Two good concrete example suggestions I've seen so far:

Eben suggested Chat at least (and perhaps some others) could be using  
the buddy name as part of its default title, "Gary's Chat Activity'.  
This has the added benefit that when shared, the Neighbourhood view  
will get that more descriptive title (you currently need to edit a  
title before sharing for the text to show up).

Christoph suggested Write could use the first few words from the  
document as part of the default title so "The Lazy Dog Write  
Activity". This could get quite smart, but a few cases could be enough  
ie. take first line of text followed by newline as title, limit to N  
words, if longer than N also add ellipsis. "A voyage in space; a  
course of six lectures 'adapted... Write Activity"

It's also been suggested that when title names are identical, it would  
be nice to append a unique number so at least there is some different  
text in the title. Perhaps a natural language date string could serve  
as the same device (as the Journal is not providing any way of  
presenting creation dates and could realy help when searching "tuesday  
august 18 notes").

I think each Activity will have different options to get a good name  
(i.e in Labyrinth I could have it take the text from the primary man  
node), but se should agree on some general improvements so we can have  
some consistency in behaviour (i.e. an extended set of recommended  
title guidelines for activity authors).

Regards,
--Gary