[Sugar-devel] customizing activity launch (was Re: [IAEP] View Slides an alternative to PowerPoint?)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 02.07.2009, at 18:40, Eben Eliason wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Bert  
> Freudenberg<bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>> (moving to devel-list)
>>
>> Yes indeed, but we still have no obvious technical solution for this
>> in Sugar.
>>
>> Adding a pre-made project to the Journal might work, but currently it
>> would be resumed regularly and modified on stopping. It would need to
>> be marked as a template so that when keeping it, a copy is saved by
>> default. However, finding this template in the Journal would be hard.
>>
>> Making it into a separate activity bundle seems somewhat pretentious
>> to me, it would just be Etoys under a different name, right? And it
>> would suffer from the same resume-by-default problem like Etoys, in
>> that the Sugar UI makes it not easy enough to launch a fresh  
>> instance.
>>
>> Ideas welcome.
>
> That's hard. I think one point here is that there's often a tradeoff
> between flexibility and simplicity (though not always). Etoys is
> extraordinarily powerful, and can do all kinds of awesome things, but
> if someone really JUST wants a simple slideshow, a tool designed just
> for this, with a few really basic slide templates all ready to go the
> moment a new activity is started might be worthwhile as well.

If you take the current discussion on IAEP into account you might  
start to see why that's not necessarily the case. Yes it should be  
simple to get started, but it should not be limiting the creativity.

Here the "activity focus" of Sugar becomes limiting, IMHO, because if  
you have this "simple" slide show activity there is no way to pull in  
all the other cool things you could create in Sugar.

> For Etoys itself, maybe some of those steps could be collapsed.
> Perhaps instead of clicking on "new project", there are simply a
> number of different primitive types of projects to choose from, one of
> which is a "book." Maybe clicking on this can set up the UI as best it
> can for that project, revealing those tools, adding the first page,
> creating a sample slide with placeholder text, etc. This would reduce
> those first 5 or six steps to about 2 or 3, right?


Sure we can do it in Etoys (although there is only so much we can put  
on the start screen). But this seems like a problem that's better  
tackled on the Sugar scale.

Besides, have you even tried the steps? If you ever worked with Etoys  
before in Sugar the first steps I listed are not relevant, because you  
always have to do them. Even for a dumbed-down activity you would have  
to launch it, making sure to create a new instance rather than  
resuming an existing one, right? I don't buy that this is "too hard".  
I guess I should not have listed each click because people aren't  
trying it anyway.

- Bert -