[Sugar-devel] [NEW FEATURE] write to the journal whenever you want

[Simon Schampijer]

On 12/14/2009 03:23 PM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 15:49, Walter Bender<walter.bender at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com>  wrote:
>>> Hi Walter,
>>>
>>> On 19 Nov 2009, at 19:32, Walter Bender wrote:
>>>
>>>> Many of us love the Naming Alert, but even more seem to despise it.
>>>> With this feature, it is invoked from a toolbar button instead of
>>>> automatically invoked on quit. It lets the learning take notes
>>>> repeatedly and at any time during an activity session.
>>>>
>>>> See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Write_to_journal_anytime
>>>>
>>>> This is a quick hack. We may want to revisit the toolbar integration
>>>> and certainly need a better icon :)
>>>
>>> :-)
>>>
>>> The first thing that comes to mind is something Journal icon like (but still distinguishable from the Journal activity icon), the original Journal with pencil seems a good place to work from (as Eduardo already mentioned).
>>>
>>>> Comments?
>>>
>>> Yes, I do like the intent, though I'm not sure we have activity toolbar space for another new icon. How about the whole dialogues content be placed in the activity icon secondary toolbar design (I think Simon raised this once before)? This would also make it non-modal, so you can add notes and interact with your activity canvas without the 'click the tick' edit cycle. The secondary toolbar does scale to fit the content height, but you'd need to be sensitive with the amount of space used as some activities will layout badly if too much of their canvas space is eaten away. I could try a few mockups if this approach seems reasonable.
>>
>> My mock up was just to get the ball rolling on this. It is a
>> reasonable fall-back if we cannot get a better solution implemented in
>> time for 0.88, but I would love to see more ideas emerge.
>
> I'm a bit wary about quick temporary fixes with big impact in the UI,
> because deployments generate materials that get outdated, etc.
>
> I'm pinging Christian and Eben in case they have more ideas about how
> to resolve the issue.
>
> About the bug of the values in the activity not being updated by
> changes in the journal, I think Simon is already working on it.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu

In yesterday's design meeting [1] we discussed this issue. The outcome
was the following (full logs can be found at [2]):

==Write to Journal anytime==
Instead of the naming alert when you close an activity *for the first
time* we will switch to the Journal detail few of the activity. The back 
button on the detail page will bring you, like in general Journal use, 
to the main Journal page. The NamingAlert will go away. This will 
enforce the concept of the Journal.

We discussed as well the option to add a tool button to the activity
palette that would let you add the description and tags from within the
activity. There is a mockup for a description button [3], it should be 
expanded to have as well the tags option.


Are there any major problems with this approach? Feedback from the field 
why this approach would be a complete disaster?

Thanks,
     Simon

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/0.88_Meeting
[2]
http://meeting.olpcorps.net/sugar-meeting/sugar-meeting.log.20100116_1110.html
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Description.png