Features/Write to journal anytime

Summary

Replacement for the Naming Alert that lets you write to the Journal at any time while working on an activity.

Owner

• Name: Walter Bender
• Email: <walter at sugarlabs dot org>

Current status

• Targeted release: 0.90
• Last updated: 08.10.2010
• Percentage of completion: 50%

Detailed Description

Old Description: The Naming Alert is loved by some and despised by others. This enhancement makes it be available on demand from the activity toolbar Frame instead of automatically imposed when closing an activity. The goal is to encourage more writing and reflection throughout the activity, not just at the end.

New Description: The Naming Alert is loved by some and despised by others. This enhancement replaces it with a mechanism whereby notes can be added to the description field on demand from within an activity. Note that the only other user-midifiable fields in the Extended View of a Journal entry are Title, Tags, and Star (Favorite). The title has a mechanism for changing it in the toolbar already. There is a separate proposal for modifying tags. By using the same mechanism as the Alerts, it is non-modal and doesn't interfere with the action of the activity itself. The goal remains to encourage more writing and reflection throughout the activity, not just at the end.

The open questions in my mind are:

• How is this alert evoked? A dedicated icon (See above) on the Activity toolbar (replacing for example the spot taken by the deprecated Keep button)? or a dedicated key on the keyboard (perhaps the unused Bulletin Board key)? or some other mechanism?
• Should it be the entire entry or just a text field for augmenting the entry?
• Should it be folded into activity.py for all activities or just a mechanism reserved for activity authors who want this feature?
• Should it be optional and/or the default behavior?

Benefit to Sugar

Being able to write to the Journal at any time is a feature requested both from the field and from pedagogist. And adding this ability would mean that the "annoying" naming alert could be removed as it would be redundant.

Scope

The basic functionality is complete. I just made some simple changes to sugar-toolkit/src/sugar/activity/namingalert.py (eliminated the call to activity.close() and changed the button shortcut from Return to <Ctrl>s). We need: (1) a better icon; (2) decide if we want this to be a part of the standard activity toolbar; (3) decide whether the pop-up window or some toolbar widget is a better choice; and (4) eliminate the Name Alert invocation in activity.py.

I decided to implement this by adding write to Journal as a menu option to the activity's Frame instance in the shell. This will mean that we need no modifications to the toolbar, but it also means we need to find a way to notify the shell of the activities's object_id, since currently the shell only tracks activity_ids.

How To Test

Preparation

• Install the patch to widget.py
• Install the icon

Testing

1. Launch any Sugar activity
2. Open the activity toolbar
3. Observe whether or not the Write-to-Journal icon is on the toolbar
4. Click on the Write-to-Journal icon to open the palette
5. Observe whether or not a palette and text box appear below the icon
6. Observe whether or not the description metadata is displayed in the text box (if there was no description already written, the text box will be empty)
7. Type some text into the box
8. Exit the activity
9. Open the Detail View of the activity instance in the Journal
10. Observe whether or not the text entered above is visible in the Description field

User Experience

Users may notice that the Naming Alert is missing and they may notice a new icon on the activity toolbar.

Dependencies

No new dependencies

Contingency Plan

What I have done to date is implement this as an activity button as oppose to integrate it into Sugar. This is a reasonable fall-back if we cannot reach consensus as to a path forward.

Documentation

See [1]

Release Notes

Comments and Discussion

• See discussion tab for this feature