[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Simple Journal Backup & Restore Control Panel

[Eben Eliason]

Hello,

I realize it's been a while since this was discussed, but I figured
I'd share some thoughts, in no particular order before I archived the
thread.

• Having a settings module for this seems reasonable. It might be more
fitting to just call it "Journal Backup" instead of "Management",
since it is exclusively for this function. I could see adding any
pertinent versioning settings here as well in the future, even with
the more specific name.

• It could also be nice to have a "Back up now" option in the Journal
palette. I don't think it's necessary to expose the restore action in
the palette, though.

• The icon looks reasonable, though using the "fullscreen" icon in
this context is somewhat confusing. It might be better to use the keep
icon, with bidirectional arrows, to maintain the visual language
there.

• The large clickable buttons are nice. I think in this instance it
would be even better to have nice large up and down arrows to further
emphasize the actions. The ones that were made for the 3G device
traffic could work in this context, too.

• I think this might work better as a two column layout, with backup
on the left and restore on the right, with accompanying text and
information. As it stands, the description is a bit far removed from
the actual buttons, making it look more like the buttons are one unit
and the descriptions are a second unit, instead od relating the
description to the button.

• I would change the label to "Back up now" instead of "Backup." Two
notes on that: first, it's a pet peeve, but "back up" should be two
words when used as a verb (a "backup" is a noun), and buttons should
always read as actions; second, I think emphasizing the "do it now"
nature of the button is useful here, especially since backups should
be made automatically, periodically. In fact, changing the description
to convey this would also be useful.

• It would also be great to have an indication of the last time a
backup was made, to know whether or not it's worth invoking another. I
would add a "Last backup:" label with a relative date (eg. "3 hours
ago") to the backup column.

• The restore column would do well to convey the results of the
action. Specifically, that it will restore the Journal to a previous
state, which could result in data loss.

• It's not clear from the image what happens when either of these
actions are invoked. I'd recommend immediately disabling the "other
column" (eg. disable the restore button when a backup is initiated),
and replacing the button clicked with an inline progress bar
(determinate, if at all possible; perhaps indeterminate during
initialization) so there's adequate feedback.

• If there is any way to detect when a Journal has been
corrupted/wiped, it would be great to have the empty Journal screen be
replaced by a prompt to recover from backup, if one is known to exist.
This would make it much easier for kids to recover the Journal as it
was in such circumstances.

Eben

PS. I think its useful to consider the UI for Apple's Time Machine
here, since it has a number of similarities.


On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 04:30, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 09:21 +1100, James Cameron wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 06:36:06PM -0300, mabente wrote:
>>> > So, what do you guys think?
>>>
>>> I like it.
>>>
>>> I presume it won't appear unless a school server is known?
>>
>> I wonder if this can be done at the control panel level... probably
>> easier to let the icon appear anyway, and then disable the functionality
>> in the window.
>>
>> In the future, we may want to add a backup/restore function for
>> removable storage.
>
> Any comments from the design team?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> --
>>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>>
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>