Bryan finally posted something about the Journal idea that he and Seth had been worked on way back when. We’re using a lot of these ideas for some of the basic interactions in OLPC. His mockup was rudimentary, as most initial mockups should be, but I thought it would be worth it to post one of Eben + Pentagram’s most recent mockups to give people a better sense of the direction we’re going.
Note the critical pieces that are included: the document itself, who you worked on it with, name and metadata in the form of tags and the ability to easily share it with other people. Also note that we’re using “Resume” instead of open. The idea here being that you can actually restart an activity in the context of the people that you were originally working with on the document. So it’s not just about about the “what” of the data but also the “who” and the “when” each of which is missing from our current desktop metaphors.
This is the one part of OLPC and Sugar that needs the most amount of work and is the highest risk. But it’s probably the most useful part of the entire user interface. Ever notice how any reasonably complex cell phone or embedded device includes a file manager? There’s one on the N800, there was one on my old cell phone and they were the most confusing things. What do you do with data when you have it? Where did it come from? How do you give it to someone else?
The Journal also solves a few other interesting problems for us. The first is backups. The laptops don’t have a lot of storage, so it’s important that backups are done on a regular basis. So how do you go find old stuff when you need to? In our case, because the journal is time based if you’re close to the server your old stuff can just “show up” in the journal. So backups become offline storage instead of being a huge copy of everything you have. (Of course, you can backup what’s on your machine too, but it’s just how you view your data that matters.)
The second problem is “what do you throw away?” When you’re running out of space on your machine you often get a warning that says “hey, you should delete something.” But what do you have that you can delete? The Journal makes it easy. You just delete old stuff that you haven’t starred as important. (The question of whether or not that’s done automatically is another question, but we’re flexible enough to go either way.) It also makes it possible to make trade-offs. That is, if you want to download this thing that’s 50MB in size you can say “OK, these are the 5 things that you will need to remove to make space – is that OK?” Simply adding time and a simple value (i.e. if it’s important) means you can make all kinds of value decisions on the things you carry around with you. That’s very difficult to do with a standard desktop model.
