[Sugar-devel] Home view activities layout

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Christian Marc Schmidt
> <christianmarc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Any pattern will eventually run out of space. A space-filling curve
> (Peano curve) might be interesting. There is an orthogonal question,

It's not strictly true that any pattern will eventually run out of
space.  The original layout code, as I recall, also had provision for
zooming the icons out.  So you can shrink the icons down arbitrarily
and there is no particular limit on how many you squeeze in.

That said, a home view with one-pixel high icons is pretty useless.
So this is just quibbling about a technicality.

I did investigate space-filling curves of various types at the time I
was writing the Sunflower layout.  I couldn't come up with anything I
liked aestheically -- which just means that the opportunity is still
available for others to come up with something!

I'm not completely sold that panning and zooming is the right "answer"
to the problem.  There are (at least) two other orthogonal axes:
nesting, and search.  The iPhone interface chose to add first search,
and then nesting, rather than to simply add extra "panes" to the left,
right, up, down, etc.  This isn't to say that we must follow their
lead -- just as a reminder that the solution space is not as
constrained as it may appear.
  --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )