Journal, Clipboard and activity instances vs. files (was Re: Recent Updates to Sugar Almanac)

[James Simmons]

Wade,

What you propose sounds difficult for a kid to master.  For myself, I'd 
like external storage to be treated differently from Journal entries and 
to *look* like its being treated differently.  External storage could 
have files and directories, you could navigate through them with a 
Midnight Commander-like interface, and you could lauch Activities from 
files in them if they had the needed MIME type.  This interface would be 
for the grownups (teachers), who would be the main users of external 
storage.

The current Journal user interface would be left pretty much alone, 
because it *does* work for kids.  Meta data would be fixed so that it 
persisted across reboots.  Journal entries would *not* be made for 
Activities that don't really need them (Terminal, Log Viewer, etc.  The 
Activity would specify that it did not want to be resumeable).

James Simmons


Wade Brainerd wrote:

>Hey,
>
>I've had this read_file and write_file confusion before too.
>
>I think it's an issue in the design of Sugar, where there has been an
>attempt to mix "files" and "activity instances".  This leads to
>problems like when you plug external storage into the XO and all these
>fake "activity instances" appear in the Journal and have to be
>filtered into the datastore, even though they are really just files,
>and the usability issues with the Journal spending time indexing,
>removing file extensions, flattening path hierarchy, etc.  Or the need
>to pop up the Journal Object chooser when we have a perfectly function
>clipboard on the frame.
>