Journal integration for Scratch

[John Maloney]

Hi, Phillip.

Re: Do you plan a journal integration for scratch?

Probably not in the near future. There has been talk about making an  
API for the Journal that looks more like a file system to application  
programs. That might be the easiest way to integrate the Journal into  
Scratch in the long run.

Sugar continues to evolve. Earlier versions still allowed access to  
the file system in a way that made it fairly easy to port applications  
like Scratch. More recently, with the Rainbow security system, it  
became much more difficult to use the file system directly.

I support Scratch on many different platforms. The XO is an important  
one due to the educational mission of OLPC. Still, my time is limited  
and I can only spend so much of it on the XO version of Scratch. Thus,  
I try to steer a middle path -- create a Scratch port for the XO  
without changing too much of the Scratch source code. I am hoping that  
eventually Sugar will make life easier for those porting applications  
from file-based platforms by providing some sort of virtual file  
system API. The Journal and the virtual file system could just be two  
views on the same set of files.

Re:
> At the moment it is not possible to delete scratch projects easily  
> (just in terminal) and our students have difficulty to understand  
> the file and folder structure in the dialog with the very small font.

Yes, I see the problem. Your solution sounds like it would work, but  
the downside is that browsing for existing Scratch projects would be  
done using the Journal, rather than Scratch's "open" dialog. That  
means the user would not see the project thumbnail and project notes.

If project deletion is the only issue, my preference would be to add a  
way to delete projects to the Scratch open and save dialogs. (Although  
I'm not promising to do that immediately, since we're currently  
working on the release of Scratch 1.4.)

Another solution (which could be more near-term) would be to increase  
the font size in the file dialog. Do you think that would help?

	-- John