[sugar] the ring

[Eben Eliason]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
> > It was terrible to lose the pie chart for resource usage.
>  > That was very useful for both developers and kids.
>
>  Was indication (by the ring) of resource usage actually released to
>  users?  My G1G1 showed only fixed-width pie slices.

It never shipped because the information was never accurate enough to
be meaningful.  In fact, it was most times confusing.  It is
unfortunate that we lost this (potential) means of conveying more
info, but I think the new designs gain us a lot over the previous
version in terms of usability.

>  Here is an opportunity for a new "user-information" Activity.
>  A 'log viewer' already exists;  why not a 'resource viewer'?

I think this is what the Analyze activity is supposed to be
about...it's a tool for looking at all the technical "goings on" of
the laptop.  I think there are a few sections within that activity,
and if none of them currently cover this particular resource viewer,
we should certainly add it to the list.

>  > The new design makes the loss permanent, while
>  > still keeping a visual design that no longer makes any sense.
>
>  I like the new design.  I can choose which Activity-icons are shown
>  by the ring.  That means I have to go into the 'list' view much less
>  often than in the old design I had to "scroll" its Activity-icons.
>
>  Also, as others have mentioned, the currently "running" Activities
>  can be seen (or switched to) anytime by bringing up the Frame --
>  without having to EXIT the current screen to bring up Home view.

These are both big wins for the new design in my mind, and have made
my interactions with Sugar much more pleasant since I've been using
the new builds.  Two other advantages are the placement of the devices
in the Frame for easy at-a-glance access, as well as the new [people,
places, objects, and devices] edges of the Frame which will support
the forthcoming notification system.

>  p.s.  I see that the *order* of the icons in the ring can change
>        when Sugar is restarted.  I liked it that in the old design
>        I could manually adjust the ordering of the Activity-icons.

Really?  File that one in track ASAP, as that's clearly an undesired
behavior.  The ring should remain fixed so that kids can recall from
memory where to find the one they are looking for.

Reordering of activities within the ring via drag'n'drop is something
I wholly support, but something I doubt will happen in the short term
since there are many more important bugs to fix.  This actually came
up when I discussed the new designs with Jim yesterday, and it was
flagged as a great community project, since we have no dependency on
it working but would love to see someone take a stab at it!

>  pps.  The 'list' view appears to not include a Shutdown entry.
>        If my last use of Activity Management was in 'list', F3 takes
>        an extra click (to switch to 'ring') to get to Shutdown.

This is true, but I'm not sure I have a better solution than the extra
click at the moment.  I do like the association of those machine
management controls with the XO, and we couldn't come up with a
reasonable way to include the XO in a list view. Of course, we expect
that true shutdowns will be limited in practice, so it's not something
I'm personally that concerned about at the moment.

- Eben