[Sugar-devel] Home view activities layout

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:45 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 11:39, Martin Dengler <martin at martindengler.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:32:34PM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
>>> > Hi Christian,
>>> >
>>> >   > Hi Chris--to address scalability we have a list view from which
>>> >   > you can select favorite activities to go in the ring. This is a
>>> >   > similar technique to the OSX dock or Windows taskbar.
>>> >
>>> > I don't think this is working out.  For OLPC (and perhaps SoaS as
>>> > well?) we're shipping with every activity other than Log and Terminal
>>> > favorited by default, after receiving reports that kids didn't
>>> > understand how to launch activities otherwise.
>>>
>>> Here is a tighter spiral of 74 icons for the home view (running in the
>>> Sugar emulator at 800x600).
>>>
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/f/f0/Spiral-home-view.png
>>
>> +1
>
> Sorry if this has already been considered, but maybe the favorites
> view should only contain the few most used activities and the rest can
> be launched from the list view? If this is not viable for some reason,
> maybe we need to fix or remove the list view?


Well, I think we are bumping up against three orthogonal issues here:

(1) how to make the Home View support more icons (without needing to
scroll or pan -- we saw problems with that in the original donut view
and still see it with the control panel -- this is the goal of the
spiral. (The suggestion to shrink icons down to a pixel is a nice one,
but rapidly degrades into something unusable in IMHO and requires yet
another UI affordance: magnify. I think we can avoid such complexity
for quite some time yet.)

(2) the list view is intended to organize which icons are available on
the home view and to access infrequently used icons. It also gives the
user info re which version of an activity is installed. The current
design causes confusion with the Journal and has very limited
capability relative to the cost of supporting an alternative view. I
would vote to move this functionality to the Journal: starred
activities (items) show up on the Home View. But this is a seemingly
wholly separate topic from #1.

(3) even with the above resolved, we have arguably too little control
over the home view, both in terns of what appears -- several requests
have been made for the ability to have views of multiple collections:
e.g., school view, home view, etc. and the ability to customize (as
the Random View currently supports). (Also, there is often a request
for a background image for the Home View.) All of these are features
that could be added incrementally, preferably after we settle item #2.
(My favorite solution for collections is to allow multiple stars, like
in gmail.)

-walter

>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>>> > Thanks,
>>> >
>>> > - Chris.
>>>
>>> -walter
>>
>> Martin
>>
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>>
>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org