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Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The Journal (view source)
Revision as of 11:18, 6 February 2007
, 11:18, 6 February 2007→Removing Hierarchy
Most of us recognize the "save early, save often" mantra; most of us have failed to live it and incurred the consequences. The laptops aim to eliminate constant concern for this type of technicality, making automatic and incremental backups and allowing the children to focus on the activity itself. These incremental backups will occur at regular time intervals, and activity events such as changes in scope, new participants, among others can trigger them as well. In order to cater to the needs of many types of editing environments, activities can also specify "keep-hints" which prompt the system to keep a copy. For instance, a drawing activity may trigger a keep-hint before executing an "erase" operation immediately preceded by a "select all". Of course, a child herself may choose to invoke a keep-hint by selecting the "keep in journal" button, but adequate adoption of this new notion of keeping from activities should virtually eliminate need for this.
Most of us recognize the "save early, save often" mantra; most of us have failed to live it and incurred the consequences. The laptops aim to eliminate constant concern for this type of technicality, making automatic and incremental backups and allowing the children to focus on the activity itself. These incremental backups will occur at regular time intervals, and activity events such as changes in scope, new participants, among others can trigger them as well. In order to cater to the needs of many types of editing environments, activities can also specify "keep-hints" which prompt the system to keep a copy. For instance, a drawing activity may trigger a keep-hint before executing an "erase" operation immediately preceded by a "select all". Of course, a child herself may choose to invoke a keep-hint by selecting the "keep in journal" button, but adequate adoption of this new notion of keeping from activities should virtually eliminate need for this.
Based on the Object model associated with files, each kept Object is, technically speaking, a separate instance of the activity which created it. This eliminates the need to "open" a file from within an activity, replacing the act of opening with the act of resuming a previous activity instance. Of course, a child will have the option to resume a drawing with a different set of brushes, or resume an essay with a different pen, providing "open with" style functionality, but no substitute for an "open" command will exist within an activities interface.
Based on the Object model associated with files, each kept Object is, technically speaking, a separate instance of the activity which created it. This eliminates the need to "open" a file from within an activity, replacing the act of opening with the act of resuming a previous activity instance. Of course, a child will have the option to resume a drawing with a different set of brushes, or resume an essay with a different pen, providing "open with" style functionality, but no substitute for an "open" command will exist within an activity's interface.
====Removing Hierarchy====
====Depricating Hierarchy====
=====Temporal Organization=====
=====Temporal Organization=====
=====Falloff=====
=====Falloff=====
Due to the laptops' limitations in storage capacity, the potential exists for the Journal to contain so many entries that no more may be written. However, the frequency of such an occurrence is limited by temporal falloff, which tidies up the Journal contents and keeps space available. One might think of this as an intelligent combination of garbage collection and disk defragmentation.
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