Re: Documents on the Online Desktop

["Havoc Pennington" <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

On 8/28/07, Steven Garrity <stevelist silverorange com> wrote:
> 2. Organization - rather than a fixed desktop metaphor with a set of
> folders (which I had been quite satisfied with until now), Google Docs
> organizes your documents more like email (or Gmail, I suppose) with the
> most recently edited/created docs at the top of the list.

Yes! Interestingly, this is similar to the "journal" idea that One
Laptop Per Child uses. It's so much better than screwing with folders.
(I noticed that I use my desktop background as a lame "journal," since
saved files accumulate in order.)

> If I was to take anything from this, it would be that I don't want the
> wall to exist between my "desktop documents" that I have created and
> edited on my own PC (with OpenOffice, Inkscape, etc.) to be completely
> segregated from any docs I create with an online service. I'm not sure
> how, but it seems that a document I create on my desktop should show up
> in my google docs and vice-versa.

Yes again! I have looked at this in fact. There are two approaches
that both don't work. Approach one would be to get the feed of
documents from Google, and merge them with local docs and display all
of the documents locally or at your online.gnome.org account.

Fatal flaw in approach one is that Google has no API to get the
documents, only to get the spreadsheets.

Approach two would be to upload documents to google, and the fatal
flaw is they have no API for that.

We can't fix this since the google stuff isn't open source, but maybe
they will address one or both issues eventually.

For me if I could get PDFs merged with my google docs that would
pretty much cover it, I don't have anything else ever.

Havoc