[sugar] Home Design: Free Layout View

[Wade Brainerd]

Okay, I'm jumping in the "ring" so to speak (the third time today I
have made this pun, ugh).

I believe there are some issues with both the new design and this new
new design, and propose to solve them in one fell swoop.  I also
promote tagging to a first class organizational strategy.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Wade/Ideas/Activity_Management

Best,
Wade

PS- If you look carefully, you will see that I've also replaced your
home view with a spacial Journal!

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Martin Dengler
<martin at martindengler.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:08:29PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
>> [new home view]
>
> Eben, I have great respect for you and the people involved.  My gut
> reaction to the new design, however, was just: it's not beautiful.
>
> I'd like to repeat clearly:
>
> This design is not beautiful.
>
> The ring[1] was beautiful, and the redesigned activity circle/ring[2]
> too, but this design is not beautiful.  It lacks a sense of "macro" /
> unifying design/layout that the previous two had, and it looks like a
> mess :(.
>
>> [the Home view presentation was not a Good Thing; the] main issue of
>> concern was one of scalability . . .
>
> What what?? Creation is (journal-wise) nouns; the ring / activities
> view is (was) verbs.  I've not idea about design metaphor and the
> application thereof, but this seems a large change (not necessarily
> bad) for a silly reason: scalability.  Silly I say, because: this
> design is no useful way more scalable.  A ring of 50 icons is a better
> organization than a free-form desktop of 50 icons.  Sure, they can be
> dragged around to make sense of them, but...inherently more scalable
> (or more beautiful than your last designs) it is not.
>
>> After experimenting with a number of layouts, it became clear that a
>> more traditional freeform view maximizes potential use of the
>> available space . . .
>
> Why is space maximization the most important goal?  Clearly a
> free-form view is *not* going to result in the maximal packing, but a
> somewhat-overlapping grid/hexagonal view.  I find this whole
> scalability argument not compelling.
>
>> . . . retains the XO at the center (which is core to
>> the zoom metaphor and reflects the philosophy of child ownership of
>> laptops) . . .
>
> Sure!
>
>> . . . 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.
>
> Personalization is good.
>
>> While we contend that the notion of
>> favorites is still a powerful organizational tool, and therefore
>> propose to keep it in the new designs, this free view scales well
>> enough to prevent the need for using them if one doesn't wish to.
>>
>> Please observe the new design mockups on the wiki at
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Activity_Management for further
>> details.  As code freeze is rapidly approaching and these changes are
>> slated for the August release aside the rest of the redesign, your
>> feedback is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!
>
> Feedback/summary of the above: keep the last design with its favorite
> activity ring, but perhaps stick the shaded ring of the design prior
> to *that* behind the favorite-ed activities, perhaps.  But there are
> probably a lot of designs more beautiful that this new proposal, so
> don't use this new proposal (subject to the "PS" section caveats
> below).
>
>> - Eben
>
> Martin
>
>> PS. While considering the implementation details of the new Home
>> design, an interesting extension of this idea was proposed: a
>> modular layout system. It would take as input the coordinates of the
>> dropped icon (and those of all others on screen as well), and output
>> coordinates for where the icons should actually be drawn.  (We could
>> also include metadata such as name, tags, etc. to allow sorting,
>> grouping and such.)
>
>> The simplest layout is the identity function, naturally.  A slightly
>> more interesting layout would be the identity function, with some
>> extra jiggle logic to prevent overlapping icons.  Another possibility,
>> of course, is to compute the angle between the center of the screen
>> and the coordinate of the dropped icon, compute a radius r based on
>> the total number of icons, and then draw all of the dropped icons in a
>> ring of radius r with the newly dropped one at the appropriate
>> position in the ring.
>
> Wait, I've changed my mind - *this* is the way to go.  Forget all that
>  stuff I said above ;).
>
>>  One can imagine many more, and more importantly, the possibility
>> for an extensible system which allows kids to create their own
>> custom layouts.
>
> This would be *super* cool.  It's quite high up the gradient of
> customizability, but could be a useful amount/degree below the
> difficulty of having kids implement their own gtk theme.
>
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