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

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Walter Bender's message of 2012-01-09 04:55:54 +0100:

> Haven't had a chance to write up the notes from today's meeting, but
> the log is available here [1]. The idea has morphed somewhat. But no
> plans for a tag mechanism for 0.96.

Thanks for the log. I like the shift to a more "in-line", non-modal
interface (for very similar reasons). While I'd love to see tags exposed
as well (to me they are more important than the description, but that's
a matter of preference and work flow), I agree on them being out of scope
for 0.96. We don't even have good UI for manipulating tags in the
Journal yet; let's experiment there first.

I'm not sold on any single suggested design yet, but none was ultimately
so bad that I'd oppose it. We should avoid anything that eats up more
vertical space (like an always-open alert), though. The screen on XOs
and similar machines is pretty sparse. Opening the activity toolbar by
default sounds like a reasonable compromise between high discoverability
and having the space available (after closing the activity toolbar). In
the long run we should make it configurable as it'll probably annoy
advanced users (because it eats up space until it gets closed manually),
but that's a topic for another day.

The idea to add UI for "commit notes" rather than the description is
interesting. It opens up questions of how to interface this with a
versioning data store (Save each time you add a commit note? How do you
label automatic saves? How do you present it in the Journal?), but
nothing inherently problematic. It emphasises the need for UI to bring
up a full-fledged details view from within the activity _in_ _addition_
to the discussed plans, however. And maybe that's even a good enough
place for the tags to live.

I really liked the "turn the activity on its back" metaphor for bringing
up the details view, similar to adding metadata (like date and author)
on the back of a painting or photo. Unfortunately I still didn't get
very far w.r.t. to "desktop effects" and am unlikely to do so for the
time being, so either someone else would need to implement it or we'd
have to make do with more subtle hints at first. The details view button
is something we can tackle the next cycle, however. IMO even the commit
notes alone are good enough to replace the Naming Alert.

Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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