[Sugar-devel] Calculate toolbars work in progress shots

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> Hi Eben,
>
> On 11 Sep 2009, at 20:11, Eben Eliason wrote:
>
>> Looks great! The icons are quite nice.
>>
>> My only suggestion is that (still retaining the modularity!) the misc
>> toolbar actually just be added as another secondary toolbar. That
>> leaves the basic toolbar mostly empty, but that's ok! This is an
>> instance, I think, where all of the basic functionality of the
>> calculator lives outside of the toolbar, and each toolbar adds
>> advanced functionality on top of that. Moreover, "misc" controls seem
>> to be the worst suited for a primary toolbar, which should instead
>> contain controls that are nearly always useful, or useful in all
>> contexts.
>
> Thanks, that's pretty much where I was at but wanted another opinion :-) The
> one exception (for the future) will I hope be the Plot function. I'd love to
> see that UI improved via a Secondary toolbar, at the least with a set of
> standard example graphs for folks to plug in values (now that matplot lib is
> supported).

Yeah, definitely. It would make sense to have a toolbar dedicated to that.

I could also see dedicating a toolbar to constants. You've got buttons
for a couple of them. Perhaps a few more could be added. If some don't
have obvious symbols or frequent use, the constants toolbar could also
have a dropdown that read "add a constant" by default, and contained a
list of many with full names to add. A suggested symbol for this would
follow the trend of the color and shape icons in the mockup of the
Paint activity, which showed a small 2x2 grid of colors and shapes,
respectively. I'd use e, pi, phi, and something else.

If constants and graphs had their own secondary toolbars, I could see
an argument for exposing the display mode in the primary toolbar,
since it affects all calculations and could be useful to see at all
times.

> Any suggestions for a "Misc" icon? ;-)

I don't, unfortunately, have a good idea for a generic misc icon. It
seems like any option I can think of I would consider bad design,
which might be because using the concept of "leftovers" to group
together a set of tools in a toolbar is just a bad idea. Heh. But
short of breaking out the functionality as described above (which
itself could seem odd without more functions in each toolbar), I don't
have a better idea.

I could get behind leaving the modes and the graph button up there for
now if we could find a few more constants to add to a secondary
constants toolbar and leave it at that. What do you think?

Eben


>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Here's a quick set of screen grabs of a patch for Calculates toolbars,
>>> I'm
>>> making the code work for 0.82, 0.84 (keeping old style tab toolbars), and
>>> 0.86 (new style toolbars). To keep high re-use and minimum changes of
>>> code
>>> between the two toolbar styles, I'm using the same code for generating
>>> each
>>> toolbar, and the old 'Miscellaneous' tab content is being shown in the
>>> primary new toolbar design.
>>>
>>> Give me a shout if you have any feedback! I'll push my changes to a git
>>> clone of Calculate later tonight (all things going well):
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> --Gary
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>>
>
>