9.1 Proposal: Files

[S Page]

Erik Garrison wrote:
> However, it is unclear how hacking is
> supposed to proceed within Sugar without some exposure to the underlying
> filesystem. 

Run Browse and you start with "OLPC Library".  Click in the location 
field and you see file:///home/olpc/.library_pages/index.html.  Any 
inquisitive child is going to start exploring and wind up looking at the 
source for Analyze.activity/analyze.py.  (I don't know how hard it would 
be to add syntax highlighting to Mozilla's text rendering.)

>  Even if it is possible to do via the Terminal, we are not
> making it easy for users to start by providing two incompatible views on
> data.

Yes.  I can't even look in file:///home/olpc/.sugar  I've had 
intermittent problems in the past where I'm unable to browse other 
directories, but this directory is hidden to Browse by design.



Files?  I think mankind is in the middle of a 25-year transition to 
versioned URIs.  It's strange that viewing that source file isn't chock 
full of links.  But I know of no O.S. that's figured it out (remember 
public_html directories and Microsoft's "View as Web folder"?) and 
meanwhile the Journal is an advance on a mere file system.  There's no 
web server on the XO, so it's hard for it to figure out the URI'd future 
either.

If I ruled the world the Journal would be reuse + extension of Firefox 
3's Places feature.  Places has the same history, tags, search, last 
viewed, description, etc.; it allows but does not require subfolders. 
That would be the start of the unification of browsing the web and your 
local work that's surely coming.

Thanks for all you do.
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=S Page