[Sugar-devel] modified Home View

[Gary Martin]

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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