[Etoys] Feature future

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Feb 19, 2008, at 21:05 , karl wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>
>>>> retty much feature- complete.
>>>>
>>> I know feature creep is easy but here are a few items I have   
>>> thought would be great:
>>>
>>> -Some sort of  scripting access to Journal files so one can  
>>> build  media players (slideshows, music player etc) without  
>>> internalizing  the files.
>>>
>>
>> That would be cool. Can you imagine how it should look like? We  
>> have  not had that functionality in Etoys before (like, making a  
>> slideshow  from a directory of files).
>>
> My thought was to add a category to Holders which would look  
> something like
> Add Journal entry named:(name)
> Add all Journal entries:(picture, movie or sound) (I'm not sure  
> text would make any sense here)
> Add all Journal entries named (name + wildcard)(If the I have a  
> bunch of entries named similarly eg: 'Picture 1', 'Picture 2')
> Add all Journal entries:(picture, movie or sound) from date:(aDate  
> or several dates or time span) ( I have to look into the use case  
> here but dates  could be like from January 1 to January 10, a year  
> etc )
>
> I have not grokked Journal yet, so this could take some time :-)
> All references to Journal entries should be freed when a project is  
> saved and looked up again when the project is loaded or run.

To me this seems outside the scope of Etoys. It would certainly be  
useful to a Smalltalk programmer, but Etoys works more in the  
concrete rather than the abstract. To make a slide show in Etoys I'd  
rather drop all the images I need into a book one by one.

Now the interaction may be awkward here, which is more a fault of  
Sugar and the Journal, but should we really work around it by  
implementing a nicer Journal view in Etoys? Well, maybe we should  
indeed. Let's see what you come up with - I'd probably implement a  
Journal morph first and then add tile script features to it.

>> You can copy to the clipboard and add it to the journal from there.
>>
> Ok, I have had not been able to add images and sounds from the  
> clipboard to Squeak. Is it a known issue ?

No - this should work. I can drag an image from Browse into the  
frame, switch to Squeak, and drag it out of the frame into Squeak.  
Have not tested with audio lately. If you find this not working,  
please file bugs.

- Bert -