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Eben,<br>
<br>
You bring up some points I hadn't considered. I agree that thumb
drives and the like probably shouldn't have their files modified if all
you are doing is reading them. By their nature these drives will be
used to copy files to and from non-Sugar systems, so leaving them alone
makes sense. On the SD card, however, this is a different issue. The
SD card is deliberately made difficult to remove. If someone buys and
installs an SD card perhaps it should be considered a part of the
Journal itself. More like buying a second hard drive for your system
than plugging in something removeable. So now I have just one Journal
with 2.5 gigs free instead of 500 megs free. That's the way I was
hoping to use the SD card when I got it.<br>
<br>
As for thumb drives, not keeping metadata for stuff on these is OK as
long as the user interface does not suggest that you WILL keep metadata
for them. Currently the Journal entry looks exactly the same for an
item on a thumb drive or SD card as it does for the Journal proper.
There is a place for a screenshot, for notes, etc. None of this works,
but it suggests to the user that it *should* work. That causes
confusion. At least I was confused. If these non functional areas
were hidden that would help.<br>
<br>
James Simmons<br>
<br>
<br>
Eben Eliason wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid948b197c0804290930i55f3d909xd214162f91d555ab@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 7:42 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tomeu@tomeuvizoso.net"><tomeu@tomeuvizoso.net></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""> > 3). Metadata should be saved when the user is loading data from
> removeable media. For instance, if I keep books on my SD card or thumb
> drive, I should be able to return to the saved page number, and also see
> a screenshot of the page I left off on.
Yes, I'm not sure if we have agreed in a way for storing metadata in
removable devices.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Well, this has been a point of debate. Some feel that absolutely
nothing should change on removable media unless the user specifically
copies to it or modifies files on it. It's very questionable if
"reading a pdf on my USB drive" should amount to "modifying the pdf on
my USB drive". I'm actually leaning towards no on this point, to
retain the idea that the Journal itself is the thing which retains
history. Files which aren't in it are thus not versioned. That seems
like a clear distinction to me, and one that can be learned.
The addendum to this idea, which stems from the new Journal designs,
is that the Journal can record actions on objects that don't actually
reside in the Journal, which in some sense gets around the issue. For
instance, it could say "You read all_about_sharks.pdf on
your_USB_drive today". The Journal entry records the action, and the
metadata (such as the page you stoppped on), but keeps only a
reference to the file on the USB drive, instead of manually copying
it. You could resume this entry only when the USB drive was present,
of course. This opens the dangerous door of aliases, which is why
we've been operating under a copy-almost-everything model, so that
it's always possible to resume old entries.
We'll have to see how this plays out, and to what extent it's needed
to use the USB drive as a working directory of sorts.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
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