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

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

For tomorrow's discussion:

I've made a new Alert subclass that has a text entry box. Seems like a
simple way to implement an incremental note system. See
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Write_to_Journal_Alert.png

An activity could use it like this (or we could build the same
functionality directly into the activity class). The question is, how
to invoke it.

    def do_writejournal_cb(self, button):
        ''' Invoke write to journal alert '''
        wj = EntryAlert()
        wj.props.title = _('Notes:') + ' '
        wj.props.msg = _('Type your notes here')
        self.add_alert(wj)
        wj.connect('response', self._close_entry_cb)
        wj.show()

    def _close_entry_cb(self, alert, response_id):
        if response_id == gtk.RESPONSE_OK:
            if self.metadata['description'] != '':
                self.metadata['description'] = \
                    self.metadata['description'] + '\n'
            self.metadata['description'] = \
                self.metadata['description'] + alert.get_property('msg')
        self.remove_alert(alert)

-walter

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