Journal Suggestions

[Eben Eliason]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 6:46 PM, James Simmons
<jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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.

The main problem I see with the "easy" approach is that most of the
interactions with the Journal are implicit.  Everything saves to the
Journal automatically.  Activities save there.  Clippings on the
clipboard can be put there. Downloads and transfers will wind up
there.  Screenshots go there.  In the future, the Journal will log
additional actions, other than just activities, which might be
relevant in the future.  All of these things go to The Journal.

In other words, the Journal and the interactions with it are so tied
to the system already, that one would still have to manually copy
pretty much anything one wants onto the SD card or external device
anyway.  The only difference would be in whether or not the copied
files get indexed, with metadata, similar to the way the Journal
entries do; it can never serve as a "replacement" for the Journal, or
as an "extension" of it, which seems to remove most of the benefits
that it could otherwise offer.  Perhaps you could instead "register"
an SD card *as* the Journal, so that in the future the Journal
activity ignores NAND and instead operates only on the registered
device instead. This doesn't really extend the memory...it simply
swaps it out (for something with, presumably, much more), which is
still not that great.

- Eben