Journal Suggestions

[James Simmons]

Eben,

Considering the complexity of having one Journal which could be spread 
across two devices, one of which could be removed, I think I would favor 
having two separate but equal Journals.  The second Journal would, I 
think, be functionally equivalent to the first, but would have more 
available storeage.  This would mean that you could install Activities 
on it.  (By default the Browse activity would still download them to the 
main Journal, but you could move them to the second Journal.  You might 
add a "Move" menu option in addition to the present Copy).

The use case I'm thinking of is maybe the teacher has an XO with the 
extra journal and the students don't.  Or maybe the older students get 
an SD card, after they are already familiar with the use of Sugar with 
one Journal.  The teachers and older students would benefit the most 
from the extra space.

For the thumb drives we might treat them as visitors from another realm, 
and recognize that they might well contain subdirectories.  Same thing 
for CDs and DVDs.

James Simmons

>Well, there seems to be two ways to treat a device of type 1.  One is
>to treat it as an independent entity, which happens to be "Journaled"
>(has metadata, index, etc).  The device could still be treated as an
>independent storage space, and it would be necessary for the user to
>manually determine which files went onto it vs. into the Journal.  It
>would give them, effectively, two separate Journals.
>
>Another way to treat a type 1 device is as an extension of the NAND.
>In this scenario, such as was suggested with the SD card initially,
>all of the available space would be effectively made part of the
>Journal.  Looking at the capacity meter for the Journal in the Frame
>would indicate 2.5 GB instead of 500MB, and the device icon itself
>would have some special treatment indicating that this is No Ordinary
>Device.  In this model, the user wouldn't need to consider that there
>are actually two physical places for storage; copying anything to the
>Journal could silently place it in the other type 1 device which is
>"extending" the Journal's space.  Of course, this also poses some
>complex problems for what to do when such a device is removed, since
>it effectively separates ones Journal into two pieces, and perhaps for
>that reason alone, ignoring technical concerns, it should be
>immediately forgotten that I brought this other approach up.
>
>If this is in any way feasible, perhaps it does only make sense for SD
>cards which can be physically installed in the machine at all times,
>unlike the USB drives which are very much a peripheral instead.  In
>the context of the XOs, this is almost the defining differentiator for
>the two media.  The SD is inherently more "permanent".  It still seems
>prudent to give the user the option to choose whether or not to make
>an SD card a type 1 device anyway, of course.
>
>- Eben
>  
>