[Testing] Need information about the functionality of a feature in Image Viewer Activity

[James Cameron]

G'day,

The list box that you describe is called the Object Chooser, and is a
standard part of Sugar.  You will also see it if you start the Read
activity.  Any future activity might use it.  In a quick check, the
activities that I know use it are Browse, ImageViewer, Jukebox,
Memorize, Paint, Read, TurtleArt and Write.

The Object Chooser displays the objects in the journal, or on an
external medium such as a USB drive.  It is like a file selection dialog
box.

A new feature in Sugar 0.84 is that the Object Chooser can be restricted
to specific object types [1].  The Image Viewer activity provides to the
Object Chooser a filter specification [2] for image type objects.
Therefore, by default, only the image type objects will be displayed.
This uses an Internet standard called MIME [3].

So your question is better framed more generally as "In the object
chooser, should the child be restricted to only the MIME types that the
activity can process?"

My opinion is that this is a design choice, not a defect.  Leading the
child into a mistake (trying to open a text file in an image viewer) is
a useful learning tool.  If you wish to discuss it further, may I
suggest writing to the design team at Sugar Labs?  I'm not on the design
team.

I've checked the many bugs in http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ for references
to the Object Chooser.  Only one is open and seems to relate, slightly,
which is SL#834 "Let activity use its own MIME type in ObjectChooser" [4].

(As a separate issue, there is no result of selecting a text object.
Image Viewer does not do anything.  I think it at least should say that
it cannot load text.)

By the way, you can take a screenshot using Alt/1, and use that in
explaining a problem.

References:

1.  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.84/Notes#Journal "The Object Chooser
can now be filtered by data type"

2.  http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/imageviewer/repos/mainline/blobs/master/ImageViewerActivity.py#line254

3.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME

4.  http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/834

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:47:41PM -0700, shiyam jannan wrote:
> There is a list box to choose a file when starting to open a new
> object to view from Image Viewer activity. The list box contains
> -Anything
> -List of favorite activities

Actually, that's the list of used activities for which journal objects
exist.

> -Text 
> -Image
> -Audio
> -Video
> -Link
>  
> Eventhough the listbox successfully filters files in the journal, only
> image files can be viewed by Image Viewer. Is it necessary to have
> other filters?  Is that a defect?

No, and no.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/