[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Examples objects support for activities.

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Martin Abente
<martin.abente.lahaye at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Everyone:
>
> In a recent conversation with Walter, he mentioned that it would be very
> useful if activities could include examples objects. From my experience in
> the field, I can tell this feature can be a really useful indeed. Therefore
> I would like to bring this idea to the general discussion and see what
> others think.
>
> The idea is  simple: Activities include examples objects that can be bundled
> with and accessed from the activity.
>
> For the ones that also think this could be useful: I am sure you must have
> your own vision of how this feature should work and look like, so please
> share it here.
>
> In general terms and from my POV it should be something:
>
> (a) simple to access.
> (b) with a familiar interface to the users.
> (c) low-cost for activities developers to include.
> (d) Safe.
>
> One of the ideas, that meets these requirements, is to include a standard
> "Examples" folder in the activities root directory that would be accessible
> through a regular ObjetChooser. The ObjectChooser is already capable of
> presenting any folder's contents, thanks to recent years improvement in the
> journal to present external-media and documents-folder contents.
>
> Accessing to these objects would be as easy as just opening a ObjectChooser
> instance, many activities already do this (but limited to journal content).
> As I just said, the ObjectChooser interface is widely used, therefore users
> are already familiar with it. To ease the costs for activities developers I
> think that having this standard folder approach is crucial. One open
> question I still have is how this ObjectChooser should  be opened from the
> activities in a standard way (suggestions?). By "safe" I mean that it should
> guarantee that it only presents this standard folder objects in read-only
> mode (at least from the GUI POV).
>
> I will stop here and I would like to hear what you guys think regarding the
> general idea first.
>
> Saludos.
> tincho.
>

+1

The only other thing might be to extend the object chooser to be able
to show "preview" images in addition to text listings. So, for
example, I could generate a preview image for each Turtle Art example
and let the user browse these as thumbnails.

regards.

-walter

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