[Sugar-devel] Html browse widget for runtime help

[George Hunt]

Hi everyone,

I don't follow the list often, but I feel strongly about this topic.  I
think that HELP should be included in all new activities. And it's easiest
for me to develop help, and to borrow from open source docs if they are in
html format.

Towards this end, I hacked an early browse, and included a bare bones
hulahop client with PyDebug and XoPhoto, currently my only two Activity
efforts.  I believe in backwards compatibility, and early webview widget
does a hide parent window, and doesn't play well in a larger activity. I
discovered a work around, which involves putting the webview widget in its
own window, and switching windows as required. I include an early HELP
template in the examples included with PyDebug.

The down side of this approach is that the developer needs to mimic the
activity menu, for the screen that includes the webview widget.  But it's
mostly cut and paste. and pretty quick.

More recently, I've been stitching Gvim Tutor and IPython together in a
Terminal Activity framework.  I have added a html help function that runs on
builds 703 through 860.  If I were to strip out the Vim and IPython, easy
and quick to do, what's left would be a pretty good framework for lots of
ITcore learning activities I have in mind, and might be more generally
useful.

George

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:13:34 +0000
Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH Sugar] Extend sugar-launch with more
options
On 20 Jan 2011, at 10:24, Sascha Silbe wrote:

Well, it is a common UI in other operating systems, so I would not
specifically call this out as poor from a UI stand point. There have been
many long threads about this in the past, with folks wanting to launch
activities from each other (common case cited is having lesson plan
documents of some kind, that can launch the related activities as you work
through them). However, in the discussions I remember, all of them hit the
issue of breaching Rainbow and its desired security model. I would also be
keen to see Rainbow back in Sugar.

> My suggestion was to offer a very simple HTML widget in sugar-toolkit
> that could be used by the activity to display the document inside the
> running activity.

Whatever the outcome of this thread, I'd love to see a sugar-toolkit HTML
widget that activities could easily embed. The issue for activity authors
for a longtime is that it may be easy to fork Browse and add in your own
html content, but it is very solution brittle and your activity will almost
certainly break on each new Sugar release.

> This is another iteration of the "online" (i.e. runtime) activity
> documentation topic.
>
> Gary, what's your take on this?

Yes, though I think Martin may be after this as part of his Notification
work? I've seen one screen shot where some part of the notification text
message was a URL link, kind'a worried me at the time (given the above
reasons).
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