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

[Simon Schampijer]

On 03/01/12 20:04, Walter Bender 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.

I had the following proposal: in the activity toolbar you can evoke the 
description field [1]. The toolbar could expand on key press to make it 
available more quick.

General Note: I think in any case if we go down that road it should be 
part of the base activity toolbar and available in every activity.

Regards,
    Simon

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Description.png