[sugar] Mini-Conference Proposal: Toolbars & Tabs (or lack thereof)
Gary C Martin
gary
Tue Mar 25 12:41:58 EDT 2008
On 25 Mar 2008, at 15:47, Eben Eliason wrote:
> Taking these concerns to heart, I'd like to propose an alternate to
> the tabbed toolbar design which attempts to address these new concerns
> with the current design, again making some tradeoffs but hopefully
> coming out on top in the end. The core component of the new approach
> is the introduction of the "toolbar button", which you can see mockups
> of at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Toolbars. There is no text
> with the mockups yet, but I'll add it later. In the meantime, please
> consider the following advantages:
Yes, I do like the idea a lot.
The main issue I see not covered in your list (and it's quite a
whopper), is that the extra tool-bar strip shifts the top of the main
activity canvas down, resizing it in the process. Problems:
1) As you mouse over, the main canvas content will jerk up and down
like a pneumatic road drill.
2) The window resize is going to trigger the contained widgets to
redraw/re-scale/re-align. This may be fine for a trivial activity with
minimal UI complexity, but if any of those widgets require some
processing to regenerate their visual appearance or content flow...
ouch.
3) Activity developers should already be using flexible layouts to
cope with potential screen rotations, however the added potential for
a reduction in main canvas size will add to the UI design/testing
complexity, with designers making a little less use of the space by
default so they leave some vertical space to prevent things getting
cropped.
Can't see a practical solution to this just now, the only other option
seems to be to have the revealed tool-bar strip appear over the
activity, but that would cause even more UI issues as parts of
activity real-estate get obscured.
I guess (1) is the UI design flaw, (2) and (3) are technical issues
that would need to be resolved and/or require developers to redesign
their activities (other than just adding some pretty SVGs to their old
tabs).
Regards,
Gary
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