[Sugar-devel] Design mockup of a different activity launcher

[Wade Brainerd]

Hi Eben, thanks for the feedback!

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Eben Eliason <eben at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvDdN1t-0yE
>>
>> I was in the code and have wanted to try this for awhile!  If anyone
>> else thinks it would be better than the pulsing icon, I'll clean up
>> and post the patch to a Feature on the wiki.
>>
>> Rationale:
>> 1) Less flashy
>
> Perhaps, although the screen actually feels busier to me. Perhaps with
> some visual tweaks it would work (smaller ring, maybe?), since showing
> how long it will take to launch is useful feedback.

I'm happy to make any tweaks to the layout, colors, sizes of the dots,
spacing, etc.  If design can provide a mockup, that would be great!
But if not, I'm happy to take suggestions and try to improve it.

> I lament the loss of the pulsing icon, though. This approach doesn't
> retain the transition from outline to fill that's important to the
> activity paradigm. Could we retain that, or is that the "flashy" part
> you aim to eliminate?

I wanted to stop drawing something big every frame while the activity
is trying to start; that's the supposed performance improvement.

Blinking would be fine, or a brief fade in at the beginning.

>> 2) Clock theme represents time
>
> I don't understand how we know how long the launch is going to take.
> Is that something that we can estimate to a reasonable degree? Or do
> you plan to estimate the average launch time across many launches?

No - the clock just displays one new dot per second.  So an activity
which launches in 3 seconds shows 3 dots.

I could implement some estimation capacity, but that would mean the
dots appear faster or slower.  I prefer to let the user see there is a
different amount of work involved in starting each activity, instead
of implying that the same amount of work is being done at a different
rate.

>> 3) Ability to count how many seconds the launch takes
>
> I'm not sure I see usefulness in knowing how long it takes overall;
> knowing how much longer it will take is definitely something a kid
> will want to know, though, so it's good to show that.

The way it's implemented now, the kid has to remember how many dots an
activity takes to start up.  But I think that could aid children who
are learning to count :)  (WARNING: Heresay!!)

>> 4) Close button (instead of timeout) when there is an error
>
> This is definitely a big improvement. I like this a lot, and think we
> should also add options for looking at the crash reports and/or
> submitting a bug containing them to the maintainer of the activity,
> eventually.

I did some work towards this, with a patch ready for 0.88, in
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Problem_Reports.  I will
definitely make it automatically save the activity log to the Journal,
though.

>> 5) Possibly less startup overhead; needs to be tested on XO
>
> True. If CPU is a concern, I'd vote to simply blink the icon between
> stroke and fill states, instead of pulsing, in order to reduce the
> animation overhead while retaining the visual metaphor.

Blinking would definitely be ok.

-Wade