[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Show file size in Journal

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 08.04.2010, at 13:47, Eben Eliason wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Sascha Silbe
> <sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 08:43:29PM -0300, Kenny Meyer wrote:
>> 
>>> Bernie and I have been discussing about showing the file size in Journal
>>> view
>>> of Sugar 0.84.x, [...]
>> 
>> As already mentioned on the ticket, Sugar 0.86+ does that (in the details
>> view). The commits are 85b833 [1] and 6c3fd034 [2]. A quick look suggest
>> they should be easy enough to backport.
> 
> Yeah, that's certainly one place it makes sense to show it; the
> palette for Journal objects also makes sense. I like the idea of
> exposing it as blocks, and agree with Bert that its essential that
> those blocks be linear. With that approach, maybe the details view is
> the only place that there is room to illustrate size that way.

In the details view you only see a single entry, I'd expect the exact size shown numerically there. The graphical form is much more useful for visually comparing multiple entries.

> One approach to showing size might be to "pretend" that we're in base
> 9, so that one "big block" is 1MB, and 9 small blocks stack together
> in a 3x3 grid to form a big block. I'm not sure granularity needs to
> be more precise than that (though we could also show a precise value
> as a number, too).

Just to be pedantic: that would still be linear, not base-9 logarithmic ;) 

Otherwise the idea is sound, at least for entries up to a few MB. But what about larger ones? Given that Sugar runs on netbooks that frequently have a 160 GB disk, there should be some theory about dealing with large files IMHO.

- Bert -