[sugar] The limits of Mesh View

[Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos]

Eben Eliason wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:51 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
> <ypod at mit.edu> wrote:
>   
>> What are the practical limits at the moment?
>>  How many icons can we fit at a maximum?
>>     
>
> I'll give a somewhat vague response (mainly because even I'm not sure)
> to kick things off.  To begin with, the answer depends in large part
> to the topography of the collaboration space.  The view is much more
> scalable when the grouping factor of XOs is high, such that some
> activities cluster a number of them into a ring.  This organizing
> factor makes things scalable, and was a key element of our design
> phase.  If it turns out that most collaborations involve only 2 or 3
> XOs, and very few involve 5 or more, we won't hit the type of layout
> we envisioned early on.  That said, I think the rough limits are going
> to lie between 50 and 100 (I said I'd be vague!) icons in the view at
> any one time before it becomes to difficult to manage.  In our initial
> sketches, which allowed up to 25 or so ("class size") XOs to be in a
> given activity, we could handle 150 or more while retaining some
> visual clarity.
>
> Of course, we're working on ideas for improving scalability in
> general, such that the entire neighborhood is "accessible" via the
> search capability even when only a (potentially small!) subset of that
> neighborhood gets shown in the view by default.  Additionally, we
> intend to add list views to all of the zoom levels, which will provide
> a sortable, searchable, filterable list of all activities, people, and
> devices present for the more extreme cases.
>
> - Eben
>   

1) I don't understand how larger collaboration groups would increase 
scalability. I would think it's the other way around: larger circles -> 
larger radius of unoccupied space -> less icons

2) I also did a vague estimation of one exterme: the number of XO icons 
that can be packed in screen. I think it's about 13x26 icons (of course 
it's possible to do that by dividing the screen resolution with the svg 
size, but was too lazy for that ;-). A full screen of icons would not be 
legible either, but was I just trying to explore the limits.

Pol