Journal Suggestions

[James Simmons]

Eben,

You bring up some points I hadn't considered.  I agree that thumb drives 
and the like probably shouldn't have their files modified if all you are 
doing is reading them.  By their nature these drives will be used to 
copy files to and from non-Sugar systems, so leaving them alone makes 
sense.  On the SD card, however, this is a different issue.  The SD card 
is deliberately made difficult to remove.  If someone buys and installs 
an SD card perhaps it should be considered a part of the Journal 
itself.  More like buying a second hard drive for your system than 
plugging in something removeable.  So now I have just one Journal with 
2.5 gigs free instead of 500 megs free.  That's the way I was hoping to 
use the SD card when I got it.

As for thumb drives, not keeping metadata for stuff on these is OK as 
long as the user interface does not suggest that you WILL keep metadata 
for them.  Currently the Journal entry looks exactly the same for an 
item on a thumb drive or SD card as it does for the Journal proper.  
There is a place for a screenshot, for notes, etc.  None of this works, 
but it suggests to the user that it *should* work.  That causes 
confusion.  At least I was confused.  If these non functional areas were 
hidden that would help.

James Simmons


Eben Eliason wrote:

>On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 7:42 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>  
>
>> >  3).  Metadata should be saved when the user is loading data from
>> >  removeable media.  For instance, if I keep books on my SD card or thumb
>> >  drive, I should be able to return to the saved page number, and also see
>> >  a screenshot of the page I left off on.
>>
>> Yes, I'm not sure if we have agreed in a way for storing metadata in
>> removable devices.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, this has been a point of debate. Some feel that absolutely
>nothing should change on removable media unless the user specifically
>copies to it or modifies files on it.  It's very questionable if
>"reading a pdf on my USB drive" should amount to "modifying the pdf on
>my USB drive".  I'm actually leaning towards no on this point, to
>retain the idea that the Journal itself is the thing which retains
>history.  Files which aren't in it are thus not versioned.  That seems
>like a clear distinction to me, and one that can be learned.
>
>The addendum to this idea, which stems from the new Journal designs,
>is that the Journal can record actions on objects that don't actually
>reside in the Journal, which in some sense gets around the issue.  For
>instance, it could say "You read all_about_sharks.pdf on
>your_USB_drive today".  The Journal entry records the action, and the
>metadata (such as the page you stoppped on), but keeps only a
>reference to the file on the USB drive, instead of manually copying
>it.  You could resume this entry only when the USB drive was present,
>of course.  This opens the dangerous door of aliases, which is why
>we've been operating under a copy-almost-everything model, so that
>it's always possible to resume old entries.
>
>We'll have to see how this plays out, and to what extent it's needed
>to use the USB drive as a working directory of sorts.
>  
>

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