[Sugar-devel] Familiar Journal ideas

[James Simmons]

I've been reading the emails about the Journal.  I have my own
opinions on the subject that I've expressed many times in the past,
but as one of Heinlein's characters points out, anything worth doing
is worth overdoing.  So here they are again.

1).  The Journal Activity needs to stop showing the contents of thumb
drives and SD cards as if they were Journal entries.  They are not
Journal entries, and having the user interface pretend that they are
causes confusion on just what the Journal *is*.

2).  The various metadata for Journal entries needs to be more
visible.  A casual user of Sugar has no idea that each Journal entry
has a screen grab, a Descriptive text field, etc. because they are not
visible unless you go looking for them and know how to look.  If you
want the child to fill in a description for his work, make it obvious
that the field exists.

My concept for what the Journal Activity should be like is Sugar Commander:

http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4291

I don't claim that this is a perfect design, but it does demonstrate
just what a Journal entry is, shows how much disk space each one takes
up, lets you sort the entries different ways, and gives you a familiar
interface for the files on a thumb drive or SD card that accurately
shows the files and directories on them as they are.

James Simmons