[Sugar-devel] modified Home View

[Christian Marc Schmidt]

Comments inline...

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > anything at christianmarcschmidt.com
> > 917/ 575 0013
> >
> > http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com
> > http://www.linkedin.com/in/christianmarcschmidt
> > http://twitter.com/cms_
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> >
> >
>
> 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?
>

I would say spiraling in from max radius. That way we can maximize the
efficiency of the ring, before transitioning to the spiral.

Walter, looking at your mockups I'd try to come up with an algorithm that
gives us a looser spiral with more space between each segment of the spiral,
more along the lines of what Gary mocked up. The screenshots on the wiki
look very dense. Gary's mockup really proved to me that this can work!


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

I'd even go further and suggest that we could have icons scale dynamically
within the ring/spiral, to achieve maximum balance between the available
space and icon legibility.

My only concern here is that we'd need to find the right balance so as not
to interrupt the general zoom metaphor, going from large to small icons
(home to neighborhood). This means we probably need to put a cap on the
bottom end of the scale, not allowing icons to become too small so that they
could reach the size of icons in the groups view...

All this will take lots of exploration I think before getting it right. I
can work on mockups if that would help...



>
> (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.)
>

Yes, I think that probably makes sense. We should play through all the
possibilities and then make a decision based on what works best...


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



-- 
anything at christianmarcschmidt.com
917/ 575 0013

http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/christianmarcschmidt
http://twitter.com/cms_
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