Activities/Library

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:

• manually included Journal objects
• auto included Journal objects
  • by MIME type
  • new version of object, if object was already included
• 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 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 link to remote object

Subjective tags

Will be set by activity 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 consist of several child tags to represent tree of users tags.

If we have four objwith tags:

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

On the top level we have:

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

After choosing books tag:

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

See #.

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 shared objects

Library user could operate with three kinds of objects:

• local objects stored in the local Journal; they are regular Journal 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:

• 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.

Modes:

• list view ala Journal
• thumbs view

Tags sidebar

• chosen tags backslashed list of tags that were chosen
• related tags cloud or tree of tags to choose

After proper tag was chosen it would be added to chosen tags list, related tags would reflect on the final list of objects.

Sources sidebar

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

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 activities.sugarlabs.org 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

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.