[IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3

[John Watlington]

After spending some time with touch based devices,
I have to agree with Scott.   Yes, you can "bolt on"
support for single touch to many activities, but doing
a good job of supporting multitouch is typically a complete
UI redesign.

We are trying to get an accelerometer into the design
as well as touch, better supporting these new UIs.

On Jun 3, 2010, at 1:45 PM, C. Scott Ananian wrote:

> I strongly encourage the Sugar team to consider rethinking the Sugar
> UI from the ground up for touch.  The "simple" port is likely to yield
> a very unsatisfactory experience; "fat fingers" are just not precise
> pointing devices, and a lot of gestures which seem intuitive for a
> mouse don't really work for touch.  In the same vein, there are many
> finger gestures which are intuitive which aren't being exploited in
> the mouse-based UI.  And, of course, the whole "pop up a keyboard" to
> type thing is weird now; keyboard shortcuts and special "home", "view
> source", etc, keys don't work as well.  Everything needs a place on
> screen.
> 
> My suggestion would be to first convene a "ground up rethink" of what
> a touch-based Sugar could be.  Then, realizing that the best is the
> enemy of the good and the realistic limits on Sugar development, draw
> up a "from here to there" plan concentrating on grabbing the
> lowest-hanging fruit first (perhaps a redesign of the home screen, or
> rethinking palette menus, or whatever) and embarking on an incremental
> strategy to adapt.
> 
> Software engineers like to think in terms of generalities, and "what
> can we do that's not too hard", but I'm suggesting that's *not* the
> most fruitful way to approach adaptation to touch.  The engineering
> thinking should be *second*.  Design and user experience should be
> first.  Every designer should probably be required to have spent
> serious time with an iPhone or iPad or touchscreen phone (preferably
> from a variety of different touch-based OSes) to be sure we're not
> just mapping mouse onto touch.  Ideally, take some time to give an
> iPad to a 3-6 yr old and watch and learn.  The result should be a
> *book*, which describes the ideal UI.  That will be the long term
> (think, next decade!) goals for Sugar.
> 
> I'd personally like to see the Sugar team come up with bold ideas that
> go *beyond* what we're seeing in Android and iPhone OS; in particular,
> how to best enable *content creation*.  We've always said we'd like to
> see a movie editing application in Sugar.  Concentrating on what
> Record or Etoys or TurtleArt might look like with a touch-based UI
> would be bold thinking that would radically advance Sugar's mission.
> What does it mean to have the entire environment written in Python, if
> Python is clumsy and hard to use with a touch-based interface?  Maybe
> the direct-manipulation model of Etoys is a more natural fit?  What
> does "view source" mean in a touch-enabled world?
> 
> I look forward to exciting times and crazy great ideas!

Yep!

Cheers,
wad

 --scott
> 
> -- 
>                         ( http://cscott.net/ )
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