Hi James, On 23 Jul 2009, at 16:52, Jim Simmons wrote:
> Yesterday I had an email exchange with Scotty Auble of the Rural > Design Collective project who have a list of 2,000 some odd books they > want to distribute to Sugar users without requiring them to have > Internet access. The thought I had was Zip archives with a catalog > file, perhaps in Dublin Core format, and a new Activity that would > look inside these archives, generate a browsable catalog from the > catalog file, and allow the child to select the books he likes and > create Journal entries for them. I copied this email to the IAEP list > but not here. > > I agree with the points Gary is making below and wonder if we need a > different kind of bundle that can be used to distribute collections of > books without requiring the child to install the whole collection. Just wondering. If I had a USB stick with 2,000 pdf, plain text, etext, djvu, epub etc files on it... if they are at least reasonably well titled file names (lets say at least title, author), then a child can: 1). pop in the USB stick 2). goto the Journal and select the external USB stick icon 3). search and/or browse the books by author / title 4). any entry they want can be dragged to their Journal icon 5). ...or clicking any object entry will both start it for reading and copy it into the childs Journal FWIW some find step 5 a limitation or design bug for Sugar, in that you can't work with files on external media that are larger than the free space you have left in your Journal. Step 4 could be better, as the icon for your Journal (appears in a bottom tray when additional media devices are present), is actually an XO kid icon, would be more logical to show the Journal icon I think. Step 3 clearly could be prettier but would require some way of generating live previews for the entries currently in view (and then you could use the proposed Journal grid view to view book covers). It's also worth noting that although directory structure of the external media is not displayed directly (Journal shows a flattened list of all files), the full directory path to the file is placed in its description field. This is all fully searchable data, so you could put all the Lewis Carroll books in a folder of that name, and that would be enough to allow you to query Journal for them. So just some well chosen directory names (by author seems sensible), and consistently well named files (i.e full title of book) would make quite an accessible solution. Perhaps if there's interest, we can polish some of the above steps to make it even smoother in 0.86? Regards, --Gary >> Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:33:09 +0100 >> From: Gary C Martin <g...@garycmartin.com> >> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read >> To: Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayami...@gmail.com> >> Cc: Sugar devel <sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org>, OLPC >> Bookreader >> list <bookrea...@lists.laptop.org> >> Message-ID: <37e66200-fa85-4d24-aa3e-9e2a3a520...@garycmartin.com> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes >> >> >> Hmmm. The down side of this is that you end up with 1 Journal zip >> bundle holding a large number of books... So, I resume this zip >> bundle, pick one of the many books and start reading. I assume the >> single Journal entry is now remembering this one book and page I'm >> now >> reading. So now I want to read another book in the same bundle, do I >> loose the reference to the book and the page I was on before? Jump >> through some new UI hoops to flag the book and bookmark the page? It >> feels like walking into a Library, but only being able to read one >> book at a time. Successful Journal entries are the ones that store >> Activity state for some small slice of the goal, one book, not the >> whole library of congress. >> >> I'd be quite happy with zipped bundles that expanded into objects in >> the Journal, well tagged, nicely titled, and with thumbnails. That's >> where the big win is in my mind for distributing content. The xol was >> a reasonable idea, but narrow thinking, it missed the whole point of >> Sugar being centred around a core "Journal" where entries can make >> use >> of all the search, tagging, and preview features it offers for free. >> >> If the Journal managed to pick up a thumb/grid view in the 0.86 >> cycle, >> courtesy of Aleksey, then that view plus tagging (author, genre, et >> al) will make Journal your searchable book shelf, when you need it to >> be, and Read (or any other Activity) can focus on presenting great >> content well :-) >> >> Regards, >> --Gary _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel