[IAEP] multiple concurrent activity instances (was Re: [Sugar-devel] Cleaning up 0.86 Roadmap page)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 12:18, Christoph
Derndorfer<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> Sayamindu Dasgupta schrieb:
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Christoph
>> Derndorfer<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>>>
>>> Caroline Meeks schrieb:
>>>>
>>>> ==Avoid surplus Activity launching==
>>>> Don't let the user keep opening activities until the machine crashes or
>>>> is driven to its knees.  Make it less likely that a user who is
>>>> impatient will end up opening multiple copies of an activity.
>>>> * Priority C for GPA
>>>
>>> +1
>>>
>>> In my (very) limited classroom experience this is quite an issue and out
>>> of 20 children you will always have 2~3 which have launched several
>>> activity instances bringing their XO to an absolute standstill.
>>> Restarting Sugar takes quite a bit of time and very much disrupts the
>>> classroom workflow.
>>>
>>
>>> From a technical perspective, could we use libunique[1] here ?
>>
>> -sdg-
>
> I think that generally we don't want to forbid running multiple instances of
> an activity because there are many use cases where this makes sense.
>
> What we much rather need (IMHO) is some sort of way to guess whether the
> user really wanted to launch a separate instance or not. A primitive
> heuristic could be to disable launching an activity while an instance of
> that same activity is being started.

We did that before we had the launcher screen. We didn't reimpemented
it after the move because our user experience goal was avoiding
several consecutive clicks when launching activities.

> Another, though related, issue is trying to keep users from launching too
> many activities at the same time. From my experience the XO-1 seems to
> handle approx. 4 activities in parallel quite well but quickly becomes
> unresponsive once more activities are launched. This is why I really liked
> the activity ring in the early days of Sugar as it gave some sort of visual
> feedback when too many activities were running at the same time.

I think that when we get to this level of detail in the user
experience, we need to be more rigorous when explaining the problem or
we risk making changes in every release and missing the mark every
time.

Who can do a good write up of the problem and its causes? Then we can
move to propose solutions.

Thanks,

Tomeu

> Christoph
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
> co-editor, olpcnews
> url: www.olpcnews.com
> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>