[sugar] Choosing "defaults" for the activity ring

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
> Removing icons from the activity ring is just a matter of
>  "unstarring" them in the list view - simple enough to do each
>  semester.  My vote is Option 1.

Agreed.

>  A much more interesting question is the __order__ in which to show
>  the Activities:
>
>  List view:
>  Since there appears to be an intent to make the list searchable,
>  there might be no need for alphabetization.
>
>  What I think useful is to distinguish "newly arrived" Activities.
>  My suggestion - as an Activity is "installed for the first time"
>  (not "replaced"), insert its entry at the TOP of the list view.
>
>  The 1825 list view appears "all mixed up".  Being a control freak,
>  I would like to organize it myself.  An ability to drag-n-drop the
>  entries within the list would be handy.

The activity list is planned to be sortable by name and install time
(inverted?):
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Activity_Management#14

>  Ring view:
>  One question - should it be easy for BB to sit down at AA's laptop?
>  [This implies that 'Chat' (for example) should be at two o'clock on
>  everyone's XO.]  My opinion is to let every user put 'Chat' wherever
>  he wants.

Well, I think having the icons in different positions won't make
"difficult" to share the laptops. As the position of the icons depends
on the number of icons in the ring, I don't see how we could have
fixed positions.

Right now the icons are ordered in an arbitrary and unknown (to me)
order. Maybe we would want to sort them alphabetically? or by install
time (the date in the list)?

>  But do let the user be able to control the order in which the icons
>  are presented (this is an artifact now provided by the 650 file
>  'activities.defaults').

Adding reordering by dnd looks like quite a bit of work to me. Is it
really needed?

>  p.s.  The "drop-down menu" from an icon can obscure the adjacent
>  icon (should the user merely want to view the label of the current
>  icon).  Let me suggest positioning such a menu outside the circle.

In my opinion we are a bit far from the moment when doing this
refinements will make sense, but patches are welcome ;)

Tomeu