[sugar] [IAEP] Narrative.

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 10 Oct 2008, at 14:26, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 3:02 AM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 12:27 AM, Michael Stone
>>> <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Bill,
>>>>
>>>> Here's a short dialogue between myself, Ben Schwartz, Martin
>>>> Dengler,
>>>> and Bobby Powers on my interpretation of "narrative" as it might
>>>> apply
>>>> to a user interface designed for "engaging children in the world of
>>>> learning":
>>>>   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Sugar_2
>>
>> Do we have any proposals of changes to Sugar so it better supports
>> learning in light of the reflections on "narrative"?
>
> One random thought that overlaps with some ideas on Activity help...
>
> What if Activity and Content bundles were one and the same. You could
> have bundles that just hold an Activity to install, or just have
> Content for the library, or more interestingly have it hold both an
> Activity and library Content.
>
> For a concrete example, I could see myself writing a handful of web
> pages as part help, and part guide, to viewing and understanding the
> Moon, it's phases, some traditions, stories etc. I do not want to
> bloat out the Moon Activity UI with help tabs, buttons, and pages of
> text and images formatted in some weird GTK encoding. The Activity
> should be clean and light and focused on it's function.
>
> All the 'narrative' material should go into the library as html web
> content (pdf's can be nice but are resource intensive and have
> interaction issues of their own). It would be great if by installing
> Moon.xo, the bundle could also contain some library content.
>
> Actually this is what the Mac OSX does. Applications contain what is
> pretty much some indexed html help files that the system auto adds to
> it's help engine when you install an Application. My MoonDock app uses
> this to provide a page or two of instruction about the Moon.
>
> I guess I could provide something similar today by making two bundles,
> one of html library content, and one of the Activity bundle. Maybe
> there are benefits to this dual bundle arrangement (separate the
> Activity from documentation translation tasks; only install what you
> need to preserve nand space)?

You bring up very good pros and cons.  I think it would be convenient
indeed if the bundle format allowed activity, help, and content
bundles to be packaged up together and handled appropriately by the
relevant parts of the system.  Making a "pluggable" help system like
this was one hope we had.  Maybe the right thing to do instead (or in
addition) is to extend the idea that bundles can come in a variety of
canonical forms, perhaps each with their own mime-type, so that they
can be downloaded from anywhere and then opened by the correct
activity when launched (and, better, automatically detected by the
relevant activities when needed).

We should definitely give another look at bundles and how we expect
them to operate in Sugar.  All types of bundles currently hobble
along; a precise definition for what they are and how they function
would be a big step forward.

- Eben

> --Gary
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