[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Write to Journal Anytime

[Christian Marc Schmidt]

Hi Walter--yes, I have time to discuss this on the weekend (Sunday?). Let
me know if we can use our original timeslot at 10am ET.

Christian
------------------------------
From: Walter Bender
Sent: 1/3/2012 11:04 AM
To: Walter Bender; Sugar-dev Devel
Cc: Gonzalo Odiard; manuel quiñones; Simon Schampijer; Gary C Martin;
Christian Marc Schmidt
Subject: [DESIGN] Write to Journal Anytime

Gary, Christian, et al.,

We are hopefully going to land some variant of the "Write to Journal
Anytime" patch in Sugar 0.96 [1]. I'd like to discuss the details before
jumping back into the code. The current plan of record is essentially to
make a modal display of the Journal expanded entry (detail view) available
on demand from a button on the activity toolbar (grabbing space freed up by
the elimination of the Keep button). This is essentially what I mocked up
about two years ago.

While we may have had Design Team consensus on this plan in January 2011, I
remain skeptical. The problems I see with this approach are: (1) the user
cannot see their current work while the model window is displayed -- since
presumably the goal is to write about what you are working on, this seems
problematic; (2) most of the fields in the detail view are irrelevant to
the task of taking notes; (3) some of the fields, e.g., title, already have
mechanisms for change; (4) many of the fields are not human-editable, e.g.,
preview image, collabarators....

For these reasons and my general dislike of modal interfaces, I suggest a
simple alternative: a text entry in the toolbar that lets you add notes to
the description field directly from the toolbar. Simon (?) mocked this up a
few years back and I think it meets the needs of the run-time access to
note taking. Editing the notes can be done from the Journal expanded entry,
which could be invoked from the currently unused Bulletin Board key (or,
naturally, from the Journal itself).

Would you have time to discuss this in more detail anytime in the coming
week or two?

regards.

-walter

[1] http://wiki.sugar labs.org/go/Features/Talk:Write_to_journal_anytime
[2] see numerous links from ^^


-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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