Summer of Code/2016/Journal Rethink

About my project : What is the name of your project? Journal Rethink

Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using? Journal Rethink is to enhance Journal such that students could use it as a platform to do their project-work.

The listed features can be used for making Journal as a platform for working on projects.

Shared mini-journal: The present Sugar Journal shares only single instance of an activity with a group of participants. A need is to make Journal support sharing of multiple instances of one or more activities among the same group like for Maths Project group. For this a feature of “Shared project having multiple Journal Entries(A mini-journal)” would be added under this project. On sharing a project , a new shared and synced mini-journal would be initiated. This idea of mini-journal can be implemented by creating one single instance which has instances of all the activities to be shared. In short, When users opens the Journal they see a list of mini-journals. When they click on the mini-journal, they see a list of activities that are shared with the same participants under the same project in the mini-journal (same layout as journal today).

Start a new entry or Add New Item: Under the mini-journal feature another feature of adding more instances of activities directly from Journal by just using the feature of “Add Item”. At first the student or user will be forced to title the entry he is adding. Than a File-Chooser view of Home-view displaying the list of activities would pop-up from which user would select the activity to start working in.

Integrating Chat Activity in mini-journal: As for every project work needs discussion among the group members. Integrating the chat activity in this mini-journal would give a place for discussion for all the members of the mini-journal.

Something more that would improve user experience : Icon View for Journal: Journal is in list view today. The Icon View would make searching through images much more engaging and efficient. A prototype of this Icon View is created in the below link.

Implemented Icon View (in my prototype [1]):

Journal as Service: Journal currently is used as an Sugar Activity.The Journal is always running as a service when the Sugar is running. It is accessible by also by the Journal button in the frame.

Sort alphabetically: Adding another “Sort by name” feature only when the view is switched from Journal to the external device like USB. This sort would be best in case when external devices are connected. For if the users want to copy some files from external device to their device in such case sorting by name would be preferable than sorting by date or size.

Technologies or languages used are python and Gtk. For the mini-journal I will be using telepathy implementations like the Salut (for link-local XMPP ) and Gabble that are being used by sugar.

UI design for Mini-Journal below with the details of new tools:

What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is from May 19 - August 22; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (27 June); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.