[sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Files

[Bill Bogstad]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 8:11 PM,  <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>

>> Alternative proposal to encourage Journal use:
>>
>> When the system boots, start in the Activity view with the Journal;
>> not in the Home view. Pre-populate Journal with entries for the
>> recently written help manual and selected (3 or 4) entries for the
>> most commonly used/popular activities.  This would emphasize the
>> importance of the Journal in tying the whole system together.  By
>> putting the help manual at the top, I believe the discoverability of
>> many features/activities would be greatly increased.
>
> the fact that they will quickly disappear off the screen, and may be
> auto-deleted by the system greatly limits their value.

Only if they don't get used.  In which case, those entries should
scroll off the bottom and get auto-deleted. The same way that email
client users usually delete the 'welcome to the system' email that
many systems generate.  Once a user learns the basics of the
activities, they will spend less and less time consulting the manual
and the screen real-estate it takes up in the Journal is better suited
for other things.  The system will have adapted to their
sophistication/usage pattern.  All the activities and the manual will
remain available in the Home view which currently has a lot more
screen space anyway.  The idea is to give a nudge towards a
more effective way of working with the system.

Right now the Home view (activity picker) is the starting point for
the system.  This encourages people to start activities (creating new
Journal entries) every time they want to Chat or Browse the web.  If
the Journal was the first screen they would have a tendency to
actually reuse entries instead of creating new ones.
Why wasn't a key on the keyboard dedicated to the Journal?  It's
currently treated as not much more important then any other Activity.
I'm not sure why
people are surprised that people ignore it/misuse it.

As for people not bothering to change/set the name on entries.  Here's
another simple idea.  Why not change the default name of a Journal
entry to be "CLICK TO  NAME" (localized of course)?  The icons already
tells you the Activity (filetype).  Repeating that info as text is a
waste of screen space.

Bill Bogstad