[Sugar-devel] Calculate toolbars work in progress shots

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Eben,

On 11 Sep 2009, at 21:01, Eben Eliason wrote:

> 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?

OK, this is the best I have right now. As you can see, it is just the  
old Miscellaneous tab content all under an icon (intended for the  
Constants). If I can wrangle the code tomorrow in a way works for old  
and new toolbars, I'll add a couple more constants (Golden Ratio, and  
Euler's Constant) and move Plot, deg/rad, sci/exp, and digits –  
though I'll have to leave out any string changes for the new  
constants, so their hover palettes are likely to be an uninformative φ  
(lowercase Greek letter phi), γ (lowercase Greek gamma):

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: calculate_constants_misc_toolbar.png
Type: image/png
Size: 22277 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20090912/e0e05d55/attachment-0001.png 
-------------- next part --------------


Regards,
--Gary