[Sugar-devel] [Design] Home view activities layout

[Frederick Grose]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>   > On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 03:57:35PM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
>   >> See http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar/ModifyingSugar (towards the
>   >> bottom of the page).
>
>   > +1 on the spiral.
>
> I like it too.  I'm worried that it would scale badly, but Walter
> suggested just tightening the spiral, and that sounds good to me.
>
> Is anyone on the Design Team reading?  What would it take to move
> forward with (a) including spiral, and (b) making it default?
> Should we ask for input from deployments, too?
>
> Also, how would people feel about a patch that:
>  * allows drag and drop when in a non-freeform view
>  * if an icon is moved while in a non-freeform view, the current
>    layout switches to freeform, and the position of all the
>    activities is saved as the base for the new freeform
>    configuration.
>
> (So, going to spiral, dragging one icon out of place would enable
> freeform -- overwriting any previous freeform configuration -- then
> going back to spiral using the layout menu would put all icons in
> their spiral place, then manually going back to freeform using the
> menu would restore you to spiral with the one activity you moved
> back in the place you moved it to.  Hope that made sense.)
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Chris.
>

+1 for adding the Spiral pattern as an additional Favorite Home view.

Since the Home Ring is somewhat of a stylemark for Sugar, I suggest that the
Ring pattern be default until the number of Favorites selected exceeds a
threshold number (to be determined).

The top, or 00-hh, position is currently used for newly-added Activity
bundles and for the position of an Activity or bundle icon that was moved in
the preceding Freeform pattern (with the other icons pushed clockwise).

The newly-added Activity bundle icons should probably fill from the center
of a Spiral pattern to highlight the new tool.

As Gary mentioned, there should be a change-free perimeter around an icon to
avoid un-intentional pattern changes. I would suggest a distance of at least
1/2 the diameter of the icon on any of the fixed patterns and the minimum
grid dimension for the Freeform pattern.

The icon snap and reflow reordering directly on a patterned view sounds more
discoverable and usable for those intending to reorder a fixed pattern.  For
those intending to customize the pattern based on one of the fixed patterns,
the fixed->Freeform shift would be more usable.  To accommodate both
intentions, the snap & reflow method could be called if the icon center were
dropped on top of another icon.

It would be nice if http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/535 to include a 'View
Source' subpalette item on the Home view Frame icon could be worked in to
provide Learners easy access to the source for their amazing learning
companion.

Thanks for all the new features!

      --Fred
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