Allowing an activity to be launched multiple times in parallel

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008, Gary C Martin wrote:

> I had the same mental hoop to jump through with my Moon activity, it's 
> just a viewer of data, however after a version or so I soon has some 
> useful state worth keeping (which viewing options a kid may have 
> selected), and I do have more states to add in the future.

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback on this question.

> I did some testing with License activity a while back, and do like the 
> idea. One of the things that initially frustrated me was that I was 
> forced through all those pages of description to get to the license I 
> wanted, I then named the instance 'my choice of CC license for content 
> blah', and then when I resumed later to have another look, License put 
> me back to the start of the whole process again – I had expected my 
> choice of license to have been kept as state so I could resume later and 
> check what I had chosen.

...wow, someone has actually run it! (-:

>> I'm interested in a discussion and hearing what current best practices are
>> seen as.  I haven't had a lot of time to work on the activity, but I want
>> to set a few things straight.  (I'm also generally very interested in help
>> with this activity!)
>
> Well if you're looking for feedback ;-) the main things I'd like to see are:
>
> 1) Add the required license information into the activity.info file! ;-)

*blushes*

> 2) Store activity state so a kid can resume back to where they were
> 3) Smaller images, there are almost 4Mb of png files eating into the precious 
> XO storage space, I'm sure jpg would be more than good enough.

Interesting point.  At least I could perhaps drop the resolution.

> 4) A leaner activity, there is a 3.5Mb 'built' directory in the bundle and 
> digging down most of the is taken up by built/share/liblicense/licenses, 
> could the license data be kept compressed and just unzipped when finally 
> displayed, text compresses really well, and python has modules for working 
> with compressed files.

Good points all around.  I'm running low on time to work on it, but I will 
try to handle these.  I've added them to the wiki page on the License 
activity <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/License#What_could_use_help> so I 
don't lose them.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Never, ever lie to someone you love unless you're absolutely sure they'll
never find out the truth.