Journal Suggestions

[Eben Eliason]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 3:25 PM, James Simmons
<jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
>
>  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.

That's a very interesting idea, and one I'm quite happy to entertain.
It seems on the surface like a very logical way to handle SD cards.

>  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.

Agreed.  If you look through the mockups for the new designs, you'll
see that external devices will actually be completely independent from
the Journal UI.  They appear in the device tray, and when viewing one,
you'll be in a list view that looks and functions similarly to the
Journal, but should certainly take into account as you mention that
tagging etc. isn't available on them, if that's the way we choose to
go.

Thanks for your useful feedback!

- Eben