On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:58:54AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote: >> Isn't "resume with" an oxymoron?
Nearly so, yes. I admit openly that this is bad grammar, but have yet to discover better terminology. "Open with", "Resume in", "Resume with", "Resume as"; they are all bad. Maybe something like "Convert to" or "Translate to" is more appropriate, but still pretty terrible. The heart of the matter, as the dialogue Michael linked to reveals, is that instances are like closures where the metadata serves as the bound variables. The activity is part of this context, and so swapping out this or that variable in the closure feels wrong. In fact, it might /be/ wrong. What we might really mean to say, with the action/object split, is "take a specific object from within this closure and act on it within some other activity." This is something that could be done easily from the object view, since there we look only at the objects themselves, and not at the actions/instances. This also makes it trivial to choose the specific object desired directly. It might also open up the possibility, via the palette of an object inside an action/instance, to perform "modify in place" type operations. (But let's table that discussion entirely for now!) The question to ask ourselves here is if this split can be made intuitive to kids. It might be the answer to the question, really. Once we have the new designs of the Journal in place, every action can be expanded to reveal its associated objects. If we drop the "primary object" notion discussed before, and instead /always/ show /every/ associated object /in addition to/ the instance itself (where the instance is represented by the colored activity icon, and the object is represented as distinct from that...I have new mockups to reveal this idea), then it would be relatively trivial to resume the instance by clicking it (the activity icon), act on the object with the default activity by clicking it (the object icon), or act on the object with some other activity by selecting from its palette. Actually, writing this, it almost makes too much sense to do things this way, as it always associates the activity icon with a specific activity (You can't right click on a paint activity icon and morph it into a draw activity). We can attach the "open with" type functionality to the objects themselves, instead of the instance, and solve the issue rather painlessly. It's not too much of a discoverability/usability issue because the ability to expand actions/instances reveals the objects contained within in the same view. What does everyone think? - Eben PS. I know there was resistance to the notion of a "primary object" before as well, and Bert was among those speaking against it. I apologize that I was blind to the benefits of your perspective! > Yes. I refer you to the grammar discussion we had a few weeks ago: > > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_2#Grammar_and_Criticism > > (also see the diagram at the top of > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_1 > ) > > Michael > _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
