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

[Manuel Quiñones]

Hi,

2012/1/3 Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>:
> 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).

I agree, the simple text entry pop-up is much better than the modal
dialog.  This description entry should allow at least 5 lines
paragraph and it shouldn't be too thin.

And maybe skip the modal dialog when stopping the activity if the
description entry has been filled?

-- 
.. manuq ..