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

[Eben Eliason]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Bert Freudenberg<bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> 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.

Sure. Some of this falls on Sugar (the Journal, the Clipboard, etc.)
to allow more interaction between various activities, in terms of
using sounds, images, text, and media from one in another. Not all
tools need to do everything, and making a "universal turing machine"
of an activity isn't generally a good idea unless (as in Etoys!)
that's the whole point.

There's certainly a lot of room to build an activity that's really
good at one thing (say, making presentations), but allows a lot of
creativity in the type and manner of presentations it is capable of
making. Anyway, I agree that Etoys does this well, but narrowing the
focus of an activity, and accordingly its UI, doesn't inherently put a
limit on creativity. There can be plenty of features and room for
growth within the context of the tool and its intended goal.

> 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.

Yes, likely so.

> Besides, have you even tried the steps? If you ever worked with Etoys

I have! And loved it. Though admittedly I haven't used it in a while, now.

> 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".

Yes, that's true. The start vs. resume debate has been a big one.
Christian and I believed that there should be a toggle for the view,
so that users could choose which default made the most sense for them.
I think we should add that. A plan of action for power users, like us,
was supposed to be holding down a modifier key to switch the view on
the fly, so that eg. alt-clicking an activity would start it from
scratch, without needing the palette.

Eben


> I guess I should not have listed each click because people aren't
> trying it anyway.
>
> - Bert -
>
>
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