[sugar] Home Design: Free Layout View

[Bastien]

Let me add my 2 cents of discrepancy here.  

What I like about the current circular Home view is:

- *order*: in the free-form desktop, there is no way to vizualize the
  order in which activities have been launched.  Knowing this is useful
  when children and teachers try to share activities and want to know
  what was the first one they opened, for example.

- *limits*: it has been often noticed that children tend to open too
  many activities at the same time, thus making the machine hanging.
  While I understand the clear-horizon hypothesis (explore freely!), I
  guess it's somewhat contradictory with this recurrent complaint.  A
  circular view might as well be some kind of metaphor about the
  memory/computational limits of the XO...

- *distinction*: the current Home view is very easy to recognize. With
  the free desktop view there is less visual distinction, and children
  might consider activities are organized as a network of activities
  talking to each others (which will become reality for XO-3, I'm pretty
  confident.)

Ok: order, limits, distinction, this sounds a bit fascist.

But I guess it's possible to imagine switching from this current design
to the free Home view with a single key combination.  The free Home view
would be for reorganizing activities, searching for old ones, or waking
up "dormant" ones...  and the traditional view would be for actual work.

What do you think?

"Eben Eliason" <eben.eliason at gmail.com> writes:

> The main issue of concern was one of scalability; The circular
> arrangement suggested an inherent finite quality which runs counter to
> our goals of allowing children to create and explore as much as
> possible.  After experimenting with a number of layouts, it became
> clear that a more traditional freeform view maximizes potential use of
> the available space, retains the XO at the center (which is core to
> the zoom metaphor and reflects the philosophy of child ownership of
> laptops), and also provides, via drag'n'drop, the ability for kids to
> further personalize their Home by arranging and categorizing
> activities as they see fit.  

-- 
Bastien