Gary, I was thinking myself that enhancing Get Internet Archive Books to deal with local zip files of books as well as the Internet would be a possible approach. Currently GIAB produces and can be resumed from a Journal entry but does nothing with it. I might change that so it can be resumed from a file of MIME type application/zip. If it is resumed from that it would check the Zip file for the catalog XML file and build a user interface using that. Maybe there would be a toolbar tab named "USB" for this interface.
Resuming from a thumb drive does not present any security problems, and I'd only read it, not write to it. James Simmons On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Gary C Martin<g...@garycmartin.com> wrote: > On 23 Jul 2009, at 18:28, Gary C Martin wrote: > >> 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 > > Just to be clear, this is the behaviour since the data-store (and Journal?) > re-work from Tomeu. I just ran the same test on an 0.82.1 release and had > some different results: > > - I could rename, add tags, favourite and add descriptions; but this would > appear as a duplicate entry on the stick next time I mounted the device. It > would fail to start, but the old unchanged version would still be listed and > would still work. Seem to remember this as an old indexing bug and part of > the reason for the need to re-work the data-store to be robust. > > - resuming a pdf from the stick would view it in Read correctly but not copy > the file over to the local data-store. When closing Read, it would then > display a "keep error" (likely as the old data-store couldn't deal correctly > with writing to external media). > > So, if you're looking to support deployments unwilling or unable to upgrade > Sugar (likely a very large slice I'd imagine). This looks like you will need > to bake your own Activity solution :-( > > Random thoughts. Both old and new external media support allows for starting > an .xo Activity bundle. The Activity is installed and started. So you could > extend the Get IA Books Activity to have a thumbnail view and have it check > an external media device for a local archive format of some kind. Then just > distribute a USB stick with the .xo bundle and the local archive of book > content. Get IA Books Activity could then be launched, if found would > default to the local archive, then any chosen books would be saved to the > Journal. > > Both old and new external media also support for hiding files with the > leading "." (dot) character, so you could potentially hide the archive > structure from the Journal view to prevent kids from clicking on it, just > showing them the Get IA Books Activity icon. > > One unknown spanner in the works to test for, is what access restrictions an > Activity might hit trying to arbitrarily read from an external media device, > haven't had to do this myself. > > Regards, > --Gary > > _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel