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

[Walter Bender]

2012/1/3 Manuel Quiñones <manuq at laptop.org>:
> 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?

I'd concede removing the modal dialog altogether, as long as there is
some way to file a "commit message" from within the activity.

-walter

>
> --
> .. manuq ..



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