[IAEP] Read Etexts with offline Gutenberg catalog search

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 17:18, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> Tomeu,
>
> Did some more work on Read Etexts last night and it's shaping up pretty
> good.  I may have something worth posting on Sugar Activities before too
> long.  Memorial Day is coming up.  If my wife works on that day that would
> give me a good opportunity to finish everything.

Heh, cool whatever Memorial Day is ;)

> One thing I think I did right on this was to use a vbox to split my Activity
> window in half vertically.  The top half is the textarea for reading the
> book page or the help text.  The bottom half is the table for the results of
> the book search.  When the bottom half is hidden the textarea takes up the
> full screen (other than the toolbar).  This enables me to have a modeless
> interface.

Sounds like a pretty neat idea.

> I was thinking of making a similar table for View Slides where I
> could list out the Journal entries representing images and select one or
> many of them to include in a slide show.  This would be far superior to
> opening the Object Chooser each time to select just one image.

This sounds pretty good as well in itself, though I have to warn that
in the future Rainbow may prevent activities from simultaneously
accessing the network and querying the journal, because of privacy
reasons. Though the user should be able to grant exceptions, I'm not
clear how that may work. Sascha may know more about it.

> If you end up working on the object chooser, I have a notion for you to
> consider.  Not a request, just a notion.  The notion is, how about an object
> choosing widget?  Something you could put in a scroller and use in
> Activities.  You could create the object chooser dialog by simply putting
> the widget in a scroller and putting that into a dialog, along with OK and
> Cancel buttons.  Activity developers might choose to use the widget as an
> alternative to the modal dialog.  You could make a case that modal dialogs
> are a necessary evil that Sugar Activities should avoid whenever possible.

I see the reasons for asking this, but the advantage of being a
separate window is that we can be sure that it's the user who is
choosing the entry to open, instead of being the activity to choose
it. But even then, I think we can do some hacks to embed a toplevel
window such as the chooser inside the activity window that is
requesting it. There may be some issues with drag and drop between
windows, though. I think Michael and Ivan have thought about it.

> The widget code would be self contained, so an Activity developer could
> include the code in his bundle to support older versions of Sugar.
>
> In any case, I'll look forward to your feedback on the new Read Etexts.  I'm
> liking it pretty well myself so far.  I can create properly named Journal
> entries for a bunch of etexts in a few minutes, and open them from the
> Journal with one click.  This is a great improvement over using Browse to
> download them from the PG website.

Awesome!

Thanks,

Tomeu

> James Simmons
>
>
> Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>
> Sounds great, what I would like to do is to add buttons to the
> objectchooser for taking a photo, record a video clip and record audio
> to the object chooser, so all activities using the object chooser can
> also get those media from the input devices.
>
>
>
> The "growing one step at a time" is a necessity considering how little time
> I have to do this kind of work.
>
>
> I think it's important not only because of our limited resources, but
> also because it allows for a more efficient feedback loop. We have
> many options open and is often hard to decide which way to go.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu