Datastore/Journal + [IAEP] Coloring books on the XO?

[Eben Eliason]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 2:57 AM, Brian Jordan <brian at laptop.org> wrote:
> This is One More Thing that would be a lot simpler and extensible with
> a more flexible journal/datastore (meaning storing Pictures, Audio,
> Video, Data [csv files], etc in a way that can be shared between
> activities). It seems to my uninformed self that, presently, the
> activities are constraining the output. (Disclaimer: I haven't gotten
> that deep into journal/datastore programming yet). I copy Eben... a
> couple sentences on where thought on this is headed? (there's also a
> video I took of discussion this... I'll forward when I find it)

This is one of the goals behind the new Journal/DS.  Right now,
entries are stored, more or less, as blobs which contain the "object"
(file) and the "state" (metadata).  (This is exacerbated by the fact
that we don't currently preserve the metadata across reboots, which
encourages developers to incorporate it into their entry blobs) We
realized rather quickly that, while this makes things nice while
working within a given activity stream, it does indeed limit the
ability to use stuff from one activity in another activity, or to
interact with the outside world.  In the new Journal, the object and
the metadata will be kept distinctly separate, so that the .png file
that is "My Painting" is pure and clean, regardless of my currently
selected tool, color, zoom level, and other info about the particular
instance of Paint I created it in.

The revised import dialog (great work on this so far, Tomeu (and
Simon)!) will make it really easy for activities to build buttons
which pull in object of various types directly into their activities.
The vision for the clipboard also includes text and image previews,
custom icons, setting of titles (so the photo of a shark I clipped
from wikipedia is titled "shark.png" instead of "image clipping"),
etc.  This richer system, along with better support for drag'n'drop
both in the OS and in all activities, should help to make Sugar a
richer environment for sharing objects.

- Eben