[sugar] Choosing "defaults" for the activity ring

[Eben Eliason]

>  Another slightly different option for a 'fallback' mode ? for when no
> favourites have been set ? could be simply to default the home view to the
> list mode when no favourite activities are set. It would also be good if the

I personally feel that the ring view will be both a friendlier
interface, as well as a more welcoming one for kids just starting out.
 Additionally, I absolutlely want to make sure that the XO remains in
the center up front, since this is the first thing a child will see
when booting her laptop for the first time.

Additionally, I anticipate that having both starred and unstarred
activities to begin with may help make the favorites system easier to
grasp.  Empty views are often confusing.

> 'favourites activities appear in ring mode' concept were a little more
> visually discoverable. I guess either the ring view frog's egg icon could be
> more favourite icon like (perhaps circle with are small star inside?). Or
> the frog's egg ring view icon could be used instead of the favourite star
> icon used in list view (make 'add to ring' the explicit function).

Let me take a moment to elucidate our thought process here. (This
isn't intended as an argument, but information on how we arrived at
the current design.)  We started with the ring icon in the list, as
you suggest.  However, we then arrived at the wonderful addition of
the "recent" vs. "new" perspectives on the ring, and chose to use the
outline vs. colored icon to represent this, which seems highly
appropriate. (Refer to the Designs page on the wiki for more on this.)

For this reason, we felt it necessary to reserve the colored ring icon
instead of giving it a double meaning, and therefore reverted to the
star metaphor, which will also be used within the Journal and
hopefully elsewhere (bookmarks in Browse, for one).  Our hope is that
a few minutes of playing with this will be plenty to make the
interaction
clear, but naturally that's something we need feedback on.

>  Also a few quick misc. observations:
>
>  - The ring of activities appears vertically unbalanced with the XO +
> activity icon. Lot's of white space above the XO, cramped space below.
> Potential improvement would be to move the XO and activity icon up by 50%
> height of the below activity icon. Would likely need a similar small upward
> shift to the other two zoom mode XO icons so they align when switching zoom
> views.

The aim was to keep the XO as both the center of the ring and in the
center of the screen.  Perhaps providing a larger min radius, offering
a bit more breathing room, will be enough to offset the imbalance.
I'll try it out.

>  - I vote for making the ring activity icons much larger when they are few
> in number. Start with them really rather large (and with a larger starting
> radius circle layout). Icons scale down as number increases, as you have
> already. Might as well use that screen space, and make the click targets as
> large as is within reason, given all the feedback about twitchy track pads
> and lack of fine motor control for young kids.

The icons do actually scale up to, if I recall correctly, 150% their
normal size in the current implementation. One thing we do need to
avoid is competing with the XO in the middle, so we want to keep the
surrounding icons at least noticeably smaller than that.  A slightly
larger radius might help here as well.

>  - When in Neighborhood, Group, or Home view, the new frame activity icon
> for the current activity is no longer clickable (you can't click it to
> switch back from a zoom view). Feels like a bug or omission rather than
> intention, though this does make the Activity zoom level frame icon feel
> almost redundant now.

The first part is a bug, which should get fixed in short order. The
point about the activity icon is also one of internal debate in our
design team, with arguments of redundancy against the desire to a) map
directly to the keyboard and b) illustrate the conceptual 'activity
space" as distinct from any particular activity.  I would be willing
to revisit the issue, since I initially found it redundant as well.
I'm curious to hear more feedback on this one.

>  Just thinking out loud, it is really nice to see the Sugar UI moving
> onwards!

Indeed.  It's great to hear everyone's thoughts; thanks!

- Eben