[Etoys] Projects and Journal

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Bert,

> No response, yet?!

  Sorry about that...

  I may be in a very old fashioned mind set, but still explicitly
saving a project when the user is confortable has some virtue.
Following that a senario of user experience is like this?

  1. At the very first time to launch the Etoys activity from the bar,
     he would see a blank or some initial screen that encourage the
     user to create a new project see an example or a project already
     exists.

  2. If he creates and enters a new project, Etoys creates a new
     project in the image (as we do now) and go there.  (2.1, probably
     we just create a new activity (with name "Unnamed" at this point.)

     3. He would (should be able to) checkpoint his intermediate work.
        He presses the "save" button for this purpose.

     4. His work will be interrupted by himself (to choose to do
        something else), or the system decide to warn the Etoys VM to
        quit.

        5. The user might want to simply abandon the ongoing work
           here, or save the current status.  Let us say it shows a
           dialog and ask the user whether the project should be
           saved.

           6. If the user wants to keep the ongoing project we save
              this as a new activity created at 2.  And, the user
              probably want to name it here.

           7. If the user wants to abandon, should it create a journal
              entry as well but later the user delete it in Journal?

        8. If the system decide to kill Etoys, it could just do the
           same thing as 6.  If we decide to create an activity at
           2.1, it can just add a new version of it.

  9. If the user chooses to open a system provided example, we proably
     wouldn't want to create a new activity when it is opened.  He
     should be able to make changes and save it.

  10. If the user chooses to open his or his friends past work, it
      should be a new version when a "meaningful" change is made to
      project.

  11. When the user wants to see another project/activity on the
      disk...  Do you say that the VM has to be re-launched?

  12. So, for a presentation like usage (bunch of slides), an activity
      should be able to contain multiple projects.

Ok... Senario two:

  13. Alternatively, we cut all these complications, and the user
      always stay in the "Current Etoys" activity.  It is checkpointed
      upon pretty much every time the user is leaving Etoys.  Can it
      be that loading a project from file just loads it into the
      currently running image (without trapped by Bitfrost) here?

  14. Oh, but, when the user asks to save, the user gives a name and
      create a new version of the activity.  But, "Current Etoys"
      activity is different from that activity, so you cannot write
      into it?

  In any case, the problem is the saving/loading time of a project.
We've been thinking about it but not much real progress.

  And, in any case, making new activity or storing into different
activity is not easy because of the security limitation?

  Sorry for throwing unorganized thought...

-- Yoshiki