[Sugar-devel] Home view activities layout

[Gary Martin]

Hi Walter,

On 3 Aug 2010, at 11:39, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.)

One fallback I keep thinking about is an overflow/more... icon as the last available icon in a favourite layout. In much the same way as the toolbar overflow drop down menu, it would act as  the final catch all for an excess of activity icons. Alternatively it could be an option for where the main list view functionality goes if we remove that view and decide Journal is not where the functionality should go — the drop down could hold all non favourites activities.   

> (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.

Yes I think this has lots of potential. It does raise the issue/feature of being able to fav non-bundles and have them appear on your home view (i.e. some specific PDF books you are currently reading), this needs some thought as the home view would now contain some activity icons that changed to show most recent usage plus provide 'start new' functionality, and others that always just resumed a the same specific activity id. Perhaps in this case we would revert to the old grey icon / start new for activity bundles (with resume in their drop down menu) — oh Lordy... ;)

> 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.)

Multiple stars, like gmail? Hmm can't see that gmail feature — did you mean multiple labels/tags? If we went with the Journal favs showing up in home view, we could go the whole hog and use the Journal tags as well. That way you could view home favs by tag with activities potentially appearing in more than on group.

--Gary

> -walter
> 
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Tomeu
>> 
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> 
>>>>> - Chris.
>>>> 
>>>> -walter
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> 
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>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org