[Sugar-devel] modified Home View

[Walter Bender]

On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Christian Marc Schmidt
<christianmarc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Gary--thanks for the interesting mockup! My feedback:
> The spiral is interesting and worth exploring. But I would continue to focus
> the view on a single organizational system, whether ring, spiral, freeform,
> list, etc. This preserves the integrity and extensibility of the UI views
> metaphor, and doesn't overload the screen. Because the iconographic language
> is already very abstract and pared down, we need to make sure that the
> interaction paradigm is clear and focused.
> Based on your rendering I think that the spiral in itself is definitely
> worth exploring further, and I like Walter's idea that it could start as a
> ring and grow into a spiral when more activities are added. That seems like
> an elegant and scalable solution. Favoriting could happen in the Journal, or
> we could opt to always display all activities--either seems like a
> potentially workable solution...
> We should also come back to the resume/start new proposal and figure out if
> we want to adopt any of the proposals.
>
> Christian
> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 8 Aug 2010, at 14:54, Gary Martin wrote:
>>
>> > On 8 Aug 2010, at 13:42, Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire.fernandes at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> Le 08/08/2010 13:59, Walter Bender a écrit :
>> >>> See
>> >>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Spiral_Home_View#Detailed_Description
>> >>> for the latest screen shots. I made some changes to the way I generate
>> >>> the Spiral -- I start from the outside rather than the inside to
>> >>> minimize the visual disruption between the Ring and the Spiral. I
>> >>> don't ever shrink the icon size in the Ring, but do so in the Spiral
>> >>> once the minimum radius is reached. Perhaps most controversial, I
>> >>> introduce an intermediate icon size between standard and small along
>> >>> the way.
>> >>>
>> >>> Gary: I'll post a new patch to the ticket momentarily.
>> >>> (http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2143)
>> >>>
>> >>> Comments/suggestions?
>> >>
>> >> Don't you need a way to recreate a taxonomy when the numbers of
>> >> activities grows?
>> >
>> > Search (ghost out non matches, as per neighbourhood view design) in the
>> > fav. view would seem an ideal next step here when dealing with many
>> > activities. Allowing drag and drop that would trigger a switch from a fixed
>> > layout pattern to random mode (with the layout initially intact), and/or
>> > reordering the sequence by drag'n'drop insertions would allow some
>> > flexibility.
>> >
>> > Ideally icons would be either snapped to the shape (dragging N units
>> > close to a snapped icon or the XO) or freeform positioned (by dragging N
>> > units away from their/a set position). With different icons in either state
>> > for a single view (I.e. a spiral with a few frequent icons dragged out into
>> > empty space). The current random view could then go away (as each view could
>> > be as random or not as desired).
>>
>> Just as a follow up to my above comment, attached is a quick home view
>> vector mockup. It assumes the list view is gone, with Journal stars being
>> used to indicate (arbitrary entry) home favourites. It shows a 'snap to
>> spiral' pattern, with several random clusters of activities/objects
>> previously dragged out of the pattern by the user. Coloured icons would
>> resume specific activity id objects, grey icons would be used to launch new
>> instances (with the usual resume drop down palette of N most recent
>> activities of that type).
>>
>> The spiral would re-flow once an icon is dragged out and dropped (in empty
>> space), or dragged in and dropped (on an already snapped icon). If all icons
>> were dragged out you would have what would look like the random layout,
>> dragging an icon back onto the central XO would start reflowing a snapped
>> pattern design again, as would adding new activity favourites.
>>
>> Again, just a future possible approach. Definitely no need to try and land
>> something like this all in one go.
>>
>> --Gary
>>
>> > But Walters spirals, without any of the above type extras, is still a
>> > huge improvement for those that want to fav many activities. I'm already
>> > hard-pressed to find new activities to fill up the view for testing, really
>> > scrapping the barrel.
>> >
>> > For those of you involved in deployments — roughly how many activities
>> > do you think kids/teachers currently commonly have?
>> >
>> >> For example grouping related activities in spiral
>> >> segments and reinforcing this with common icon color scheme in these
>> >> segments.
>> >
>> > -1 No to a color scheme here. Colour is already used for identity. It's
>> > bad enough that the GC activities, and a few others, break the colour
>> > metaphor by not bothering with the &fill_color and &stroke_color variables —
>> > adding even more colour metaphors would not help! ;)
>> >
>> > --Gary
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
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>

I've added back in the MEDIUM_ICON_SIZE to the Ring when there are
only a few icons. (See
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Spiral_Home_View#Detailed_Description).
Specific uestions for the design team:

(1) Can we reach consensus re spiraling in from the MAXIMUM radius
once the Ring is full or spiraling out from the MINIMUM radius once
the Ring is full?

(2) Is is OK to add an INTERMEDIATE icon size between STANDARD and SMALL?

(3) In regard to Q1, I could trigger the spiral before the Ring hits
the MAXIMUM radius, perhaps at MAXIMUM-icon_size? (I've not
illustrated this yet.)

-walter

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