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

[Avi]

Tim wrote:
 > This may be an area where the interests of Sugar & Sugar on a Stick 
may diverge.
 > Sugar on the XO-1 has a determined size. Bitmaps will be fine. Sugar 
on a Stick
 > requires vector-based images, because we don't know what screen size 
we'll encounter.
 > My experience with the GCompris applications in SoaS is that all of 
the controls are
 > horribly rendered. It comes across as unprofessional, especially when 
introducing
 > Sugar to teachers & parents.

I've already considered this issue, and really don't think that the 
situation is as you say. In the case of an installed environment, screen 
size can be known at install time and is, generally speaking with a few 
exceptions, fixed for the lifetime of most installations even on 
machines other than XOs. Even if it isn't known before the very first 
run, it is certainly known at most subsequent runs, even allowing for 
screen resolution changes (transient external monitors, portable boot 
drives, etc).

Consider a scenario where the first launch generates a more efficient 
format from the SVG, and then it never gets re-generated until the 
resolution changes. I think that would be far better than the current 
method, and I seem to remember that the code is already there to cache 
like this. I think the cached images just don't get saved and recalled 
for some reason.

I like Wade's idea of re-working the launch status indicator, but only 
if the reason is to provide more valuable information to the user or to 
make the current one as efficient as I think it can become. The 
rationale that a new method is better because it would save CPU cycles 
only makes sense if it can be shown that it isn't possible to accomplish 
the same cycle reduction by making the current process smarter.

With that said, I'd of course much rather see a launcher infographic 
similar to what I proposed earlier than see any effort put into making 
the current one (or one similar to the current one) more efficient 
without providing any better indication of launch status and probability.

- Avi