[Sugar-devel] Initial implementation of toolbars design

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 7:30 AM, Simon Schampijer<simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
> On 07/31/2009 12:36 PM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:08, Simon Schampijer<simon at schampijer.de>  wrote:
>>> On 07/31/2009 12:02 AM, Eben Eliason wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>>>> Personally, I see more the issue of naming an activity, since as said in
>>>>> another post I am not really convinced about the naming alert.
>>>> I'll have to think about this idea more, but: we could also have the
>>>> naming "alert" appear as a palette attached to the stop button,
>>>> instead. It doesn't change the behavior too much (it requires 2 clicks
>>>> to stop an activity for the first time if it hasn't been named), but
>>>> the use of the palette might feel more consistent with Sugar in
>>>> general. On the other hand, it could be strange to change the behavior
>>>> of the stop button between the first and other cases.
>>> The main problem I guess is, that the kids don't know what the naming dialog
>>> is for. The new Sugar users I had in class start by opening and closing
>>> activities and work away in them. Even though you explained them the concept
>>> of the Journal before, the relation with the naming dialog was not obvious
>>> for them. I think the naming and tagging of an activity instance is a more
>>> advanced feature, the kids will discover later.
>>>
>>> Once they experienced the power of it, they can use the Journal itself, or
>>> the facilities in the activity to name and tag (has to be added to the
>>> toolbar) to fulfill that task. No need to have this extra dialog appearing,
>>> imho. I postulate that the 'enforcing' of naming an activity was a nice idea
>>> to pay attention to the concept, but I think in practice it does not work
>>> out well.
>>
>> Well, AFAIK the reports I have heard are from children using Sugar for
>> a few hours per week with somewhat close supervision from adults.
>
> Yeah, as I said, I can only throw in my experience.
>
>> The journal makes most sense in the OLPC model, where the laptop is a
>> bigger part of the child's life and the journal contains all those
>> interactions.
>>
>> It's hard to balance discoverability and usability, and if we only
>> focus on these light-usage scenarios, we are going to hurt usability.
>
> Yeah, there are always tradeoffs, I know.
>
>> Note that I'm not arguing against removing the naming alert, just
>> saying that we may not be taking into account the needs of people
>> using Sugar more intensively.
>
> Of course. But this was my point actually. If you use Sugar more
> extensively you can tag and name the activity instance in the activity
> itself before closing it. This would be the same amount of clicks. With
> the alert you are remembered if you forgot to do so, ok.
>
> Can we state what the main goals of the alert are?
>
> a) discovering the possibility?
> b) nagging the user to name the entries
> c) adding another option to name and tag directly in the activity itself
> (not only the journal)

I think that the exposure of the description field here is very
important as well. We want kids to reflect on their work and to
write!!

>
>>>> 4. But these are nitpicks. Fantastic work!!
>>> Thanks to Aleksey and review master (even nitpickier then marco) Tomeu!
>>
>> You are clearly in need of a big code review from Marco, so you don't
>> forget any more his pickiness awe. I'm CC'ing him so you learn.
>
> :))) Yeah, marco was a great reviewer - learned a lot from him. And your
> reviews are not just a second class replacement - fabulous job you did!
>
>> More seriously, I'm very happy how this feature has advanced. Gary,
>> Eben, Aleksey and several other people have worked together to put
>> this forward that I think will be a great feature in 0.86.
>>
>> Congratulations!
>>
>> Tomeu
>
> Absolutely! The all-time coding skills from Aleksey are well known by
> now. I was mostly worried about keeping the high standard in our UI up,
> in this release cycle. The more I am happy that Gary, Eben and Christian
> are helping to make this happen.
>
> Good team work! Congrats!

+1
Amazing work.

>    Simon
>
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-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org