Activities/Library

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NOTE: Core functionality of Library was moved to Features/Unified Browser for Objects, since now Library will be implemented in plugin form (as a separate activity).

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Thanks to

Library activity idea was inspired by iaep@ mailing list thread.

Related ideas

• Journal, reloaded
• Journal mockups
• Unified Bundles
• Unified Objects
• ...

Purposes

Cornerstone ideas:

• implement Unified Objects proposal to have unified method to create, reuse and share all Objects in Sugar
• work with remote Sugar Objects in the same way like with local
• make this activity Sucrose version independent (0.82+)

Objects model

How it looks like from top-level point of view.

Everything is an object

So, journal objects, activities/activity-bundles, content/content-bundles are the same level objects.

All object versions

• by activity_id if it exists
• by activity for activities/bundles

are represented in Library by one collapsed item.

Every Library object could include:

• auto included Journal objects
  • new version of object, if object was already included
  • by datastore fields, like mime_type, tags etc.
• all Journal objects

Tags

Every Library object have finite quantity of predefined tags and infinite quantity of users tags.

Objective tags

Will be set by Library activity itself after including new Object.

• creator for activities
• creation for objects that were generated by activity (activity_id field is not empty)
• unbind for Journal objects w/o activity_id field
• local objects are stored in Journal
• remote object from online source (only for current session)

Properties based tags

• tags values parsed from object's properties

Subjective tags

Will be set by objects authors or users

• activity required and mutually exclusive for content
• content required and mutually exclusive for activity
• endless quantity of users tags

Composite tags

User tags could be composite.

If we have:

• games tag -> object #1
• books/nonfiction tag -> object #2
• books/science-fiction tag -> object #3
• news tag -> object #4

On the top level in cloud view in tags sidebar we have:

• games tag -> object #1
• books tag -> object #2, object #3
• news tag -> object #4

After choosing books tag in cloud view in tags sidebar:

• nonfiction tag -> object #2
• science-fiction tag -> object #3

Properties

Every object can have:

• summary short explanation
• description longer explanation
• icon of object
• screenshot of object
• rank

By default, some properties could be filled from Journal fields or from object itself (like .ogg properties).

Sharing

How users can share their objects.

Type of objects

Library user could operate with two kinds of objects:

• local objects stored in the local Journal; they are regular Journal objects
  • local objects that were created on local system
  • local objects that were downloaded from remote source
    user can sync them with original remote objects
• remote objects stored in the Journal of other (online) users

Sources

Every Library object has list of known (not necessarily online) sources of objects:

• local objects stored in local Journal
• Sugar users joined (if they are online) to this Library session
• (?) activities.sugarlabs.org
• (?) various sources that are provided by proper backend, for example books from gutenberg.org

If source is online user can browse his objects (in separate way or merging them to the main set of objects) and download or download+start them.

Synchronize/Upgrade objects

User can manually/auto synchronize local versions with remote versions from online sources.

UI

Core UI components.

Objects list

The list of objects which represents result of chosen tags.

Modes:

• list view a la Journal
• thumbs view
• grid view a la Calibre

User have several options for list items:

• open object, for non-creator objects
  for unbind objects use the "right" activity to handle it i.e. open .txt in ReadEText not in Write
• create new objects, for creator objects
• edit current object, for creator objects
• download remote object, if current object is from remote source and wasn't downloaded previously
• sync current object with remote one, if current object was originally downloaded from remote source
• delete object from local system (i.e., from the Journal), if current object was originally downloaded from remote source it would turn to "un-downloaded" state

Tags sidebar

It filters objects for objects list.

• chosen tags backslashed list of tags that were chosen
• related tags
  • cloud of related tags
  • tree (made by composite tags) of related tags
• without any tags i.e. all objects

After proper tag was chosen:

1. selected tag' would be added to chosen tags list
2. related tags would reflect on the final list of objects
3. objects list would contain the final list of objects

User can choose what kinds of tags it should contain:

• objective tags
• properties based tags
• subjective tags

Sources sidebar

It filters objects for tags sidebar

List of known (not necessarily online) sources of objects.
User can select proper item to view objects only for this source.

Mockup

Usage scenarios

Share objects between Sugar users

1. user A creates/fills his Library object and shares it
2. user B joins A's Library session
3. B browses As local objects
4. B can download particular/all A's local objects
5. B can merge A's local objects to the objects list (only for current session)
6. during the next online session B can synchronize previously downloaded objects

(?) Download objects from non-Sugar sources

1. user selects proper non-sugar source in the sources list, for example activities.sugarlabs.org or gutenberg.org
2. makes it online
3. user browses remote objects
4. user can download particular/all remote objects
5. user can merge remote objects to the objects list(only for current session)

Keep activities up-to-date

1. user creates "Activities" Library object
2. downloads activities from proper source
3. make these activities auto-updated
4. add rule to include to this "Activities" object all activities
5. treats created Library object like a regular Home view i.e. use it to run all (preinstalled and downloaded) activities
6. "auto-updated" should mean that downloaded activities will be up-to-date (in some way) when "Activities" object is run

Publish objects on non-Sugar sources

1. selects object to publish in object list
2. click "publish" button

Implementation

Implementation details.

Database model

Library follows simple rules:

• use local datastore API to search/filter local objects
• use remote datastore API(in some way) to search/filter remote objects
• use telepathy tubes for notifying users about changes
• sync shared objects while opening Library activity or manually

Going further

Integration with Sugar components

• downloaded files by Browse activity

Simplify UI usage

• several levels of UI complexity
• presets with different sets of UI components

Various non-sugar sources

• FTP servers

Room/Lesson mode

At the first approach it could look like:

1. teacher prepares one or several Library objects for future lesson
2. during the lesson teacher shares proper Library object for all students
3. teacher could observe if all students were joined to proper Library object, to proper object inside of Library object

So, this mode should contain mini-neighbourhood view for Library object's items.

Roadmap

Task	Planned date	Real date
Local version v1	2009-05-12	2009-05-29
Remote version(Sugar users as an objects source)	2009-05-19
Publish objects on activities.sugarlabs.org	2009-05-26
Provide #Keep activities up-to-date scenario for LTSP
Provide #Keep activities up-to-date scenario for intranet library portal

Activity Library

See also Activities/Activity Library.

Resources

• Sources
• Activity Library page