[Sugar-devel] Article on "Why files need to die"

[James Simmons]

Christoph,

I've been a fan of the Journal idea from the beginning, but I think it could
be improved in a couple of small ways:

1).  Don't make things that aren't in the Journal look and (try to) work
like they are in the Journal.  Example: SD cards and USB drives.

2).  Make it possible to link Journal entries to files outside the Journal.
I did this with Read SD Comics.  The idea is that the Journal on an XO-1 has
very limited space: 600 megabytes at the most.  If you make a Journal entry
that links to a file outside of the Journal proper (say on an SD card) you
can cheaply and easily give the Journal 8 GB of additional space.  This
space is read-only but maybe we could do something about that in some future
version of the Journal.  What you have then is removable storage that
actually acts like it is in the Journal .

3).  The idea of having your most recently updated items float to the top of
the Journal is useful, until you're done with that item.  When I'm finished
with an e-book I don't want to delete it but I don't want it cluttering up
the top of my Journal entries either.  It would be nice to have a way to
tell the Journal "I'm not going to need this for awhile, send it to the
bottom".  I have the same issue with my Kindle.  To get to some new reading
material I have to page through stuff I've finished.

James Simmons


On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 4:03 AM, Christoph Derndorfer <
christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I just saw this article over on O'Reilly Radar and a lot of what the author
> says also applies to the Journal: "Why files need to die: Files are an
> anachronism in the digital age. It's time for something better." (
> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/why-files-need-to-die.html).
>
> So while it's still early days I definitely feel that the Journal is
> generally moving into the right direction, especially with all the new
> features and whatnot discussed during the eduJAM! summit:-)
>
> Cheers,
> Christoph
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
> co-editor, olpcnews
> url: www.olpcnews.com
> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>
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>
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