[Sugar-devel] Home view activities layout

[Christian Marc Schmidt]

Starring activites in the journal to appear in Home makes sense. And  
the spiral as overflow for the ring, if executed well, seems like a  
good idea in order to preserve the general UI metaphor. We should test  
a range of different variations to end up with a design that is both  
efficient and visually elegant.

I think we should also investigate a scalable grid view with  
thumbnails--I still believe this would make for a great counterpart to  
the ring/spiral. I'll look for the original mockups and start  
exploring this idea further...

Christian

On Aug 3, 2010, at 8:10 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com 
> > wrote:
>> 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 s 
>> howing up in home view, we could go the whole hog and use the Jour 
>> nal tags as well. That way you could view home favs by tag with ac 
>> tivities potentially appearing in more than on group.
>>
>
> Might be an add-on. But I can assign different stars to my mail.
>
> Using tags is spot on, but we may want a button or star mechanism to
> generate the tags as well.
>
>> --Gary
>>
>>> -walter
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Tomeu
>>>>
>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> - Chris.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -walter
>>>>>
>>>>> Martin
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Walter Bender
>>> Sugar Labs
>>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org