[Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] Some quick comments on the Journal in 11.2.0 build 16 and Dextrose 508

[James Simmons]

On an XO-1 you probably could not copy a 700 MB video to the Journal
at all.  My experience with CBZ files (Comic Book page images in a Zip
file), which are generally 60 MB or so, made me question the wisdom of
having such large files in the Journal.  As a result, I made a second
comic book reading Activity called Read SD Comics, which is designed
to store the CBZ's on an SD card.  The Journal entry is merely a
pointer to the file on the SD card, and contains metadata like last
page read, etc.  This is a big improvement, in my opinion.  You can
get a 8 Gig Micro SD card with an SD adapter for about twenty bucks.
This works perfectly with an XO-1, except that Activities in general
don't use the SD card for anything.  The Read SD Comics approach could
be ideal for files that are much too large for the Journal itself,
like 700 MB movies.

You may also be familiar with my Sugar Commander Activity, which is a
limited function Journal Activity alternative.  It is limited in
function because only the original Journal Activity can do things like
copy files to removable drives.  If it was possible to use my Activity
in place of the original Journal Activity I could make it do much
more.  If we had a generalized method of doing this we could have
several possible Journal alternatives.  A child might start with the
basic one and change to something else when he got older, for
instance.  I remember in Windows 3.1 you could specify what executable
you wanted to run as the Program Manager or File Manager.  This let
you customize the OS in interesting ways.  The nice thing about having
a pluggable Journal Activity is that instead of patching the existing
Activity and getting a consensus that your patch is worthwhile you
could create something radically different and throw it out to succeed
or die on its own merits.

James Simmons


On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-04-29 at 16:47 +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>> I used my 12h plane ride to Montevideo to play around with 11.2.0
>> build 16 and Dextrose 508 on my two XO-1.5 machines. I thought I'd
>> brielfy comment on some observation I made in the Journal:
>>
>> * When copying large files (in my case a 700MB video) over from a USB
>> drive to the Journal there's no indication of the progress of the
>> copy-process. For small files I do remember seeing the gray-screen
>> with some sort of progress-bar but for this one it really looked as
>> though the system was simply frozen all throughout the copy process
>> (which also seemed to take ages compared to doing it on my regular
>> laptop). [11.2.0 / Dextrose]
>
> This is indeed a big usability problem.