[sugar] [patches] TurtleArt+Journal

Brian Silverman bss at media.mit.edu
Thu Aug 23 08:26:08 EDT 2007


I've gotten going again on making a new version of TurtleArt, The goal 
is to make it as sugar friendly as possible.

I have a few questions/comments about how things should be done. Not 
that they are hard design questions, instead they're implicit questions 
about UI guidelines. Best if TurtleArt acts the way other activities will.

a couple of simple ones first:

- no "New" button. The only way to make a new project is from the home 
view. Don't think there's a controversy here, just double checking

- samples projects can be opened up via a samples button in a projects 
toolbar. For now this brings up a file dialog. Eventually this will 
bring up a collection of thumbnails. (the assumption is that samples 
don't belong in the journal)


a bit trickier:

I'm confused about the proper use of the journal. Two issues in particular.

- when should new journal entries be created?
The code now (current stable -- build 542) seems to only make a new 
journal entry when the activity starts without loading anything. It's 
important to be able to save a copy but that doesn't seem to work now. 
Should "keep" be "keep a copy"? Should a new journal entry be made when 
an old entry is loaded? As it stands now its easy to accidentally 
overwrite old work.

- balancing saving too often with saving not enough
Save gets automatically called quite often. Given that there is no 
"revert" mechanism it can be hard to get back to a previous state. Undo 
is possible but that doesn't really address the case of changes 
inadvertently being saved on exit.

(I understand that the current version is a work in progress - just 
trying to understand where we'll be heading)

Brian


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