[Sugar-devel] Calculate toolbars work in progress shots

[Simon Schampijer]

On 09/12/2009 03:10 AM, Gary C Martin wrote:
> 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):
>
>
>
> Regards,
> --Gary

I like the misc icon! What does the 9 stand for? Maybe I missed a math 
class...

Regards,
    Simon