Ian Bicking wrote:
Perhaps this is a function of our different backgrounds. To me issues
of content management and basic persistence seem pretty concrete,
because that's a lot of what I work with. It's also my belief that the
content will ultimately be a greater investment than the software, and
that the content has to outlive any particular software associated with
it. I'm not an obsessive archivalist, and I don't think that's
necessary for this project (especially for content just on the laptop
that isn't hosted somewhere else). But I do think we need to consider
content quite seriously as its own entity, because we're managing it on
behalf of the child, it's not ours.
And I feel really quite strongly that content belongs to the user, not
the activity. That means that when possible the content should have a
purpose and meaning outside of the activity that created it. Even for
the most obscure or niche activity this applies, because someone might
fork that activity and still understand its obscure internal format.
This is not based on goals of "it should work in 30 seconds" but rather
"it should work in two years".
So I feel protective of content, and you feel protective of user
experience, and that means we'll probably be coming at this from
different perspectives, and I don't know if either one will entirely
drive the other.
I really don't think that these two viewpoints are at odds. I happen to
strongly agree with your point that contant belongs to the user. But I
also feel that it should also have context. Content without context
just turns you into a file server. :)
It's becomes a question of how do we make it easy to do something useful
with a piece of content. We want to make sure it's really obvious what
to do with anything on the laptop, while at the same time not preventing
it from being used in other contexts. The current metaphors we have
today do a really shitty job of connecting content with programs that
can do something useful.
We have the journal, we (will) have a decent data store - let's take
advantage of that to build something that really makes things easier.
And just to be clear, we're not arguing against choice in how something
is used. Just that it's really easy to figure how the which-to-use
question up front.
--Chris
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