[Sugar-devel] Appearance Customization

[Gary Martin]

Hi Mike,

On 2 Nov 2010, at 07:15, Mike Dawson wrote:

> Hi James,
> 
> Well I've been working here in Afghanistan around 2 years on this one
> now.  I am going to the schools, talking with kids, and meeting
> teachers etc.  I live out here with not too many breaks back home!  I
> have even gone to school in Kandahar...
> For those of us who are involved with OLPC deployments on the ground I
> think the demand is a little more apparent.  I'm saying I would
> happily pay $100 just for the time that I would save from listening to
> the requests for that feature.
> 
> That's what I find on the ground, that's what Bernie found on the
> ground, and everyone I ask who has been implementing OLPC has found.
> Not scientific but representative.


My real worry is that this will add more support/maintenance issues for you to resolve and explain on the ground, not less. I don't think it is a small design or code change, as displaying a 1200x900 image in the background of the home views will add a noticeable memory and cpu burden on already resource limited hardware.

The feature would require additional design choices (and code changes) for the display of icons on the three views; you could allow a user to pick a good complementary colour vs. their background image choice for the current bundle icon grey (activities without Journal entries) and the disabled light grey (shown when searching the views), but this starts to mess with the activity icon colour == user identity design metaphor; alternatively you could double stamp each icon to create basic offset flat back drop shadows below the regular icons.

Here's a mockup image using a blurred drop shadow for the icons and a simple wood texture desktop, yes it looks rather pretty, but it would consume perhaps 10% of memory on an XO-1, redraws and switching views would likely be unpleasantly slow. My very quick back of an envelope calculation for a 1200x900 24 bit image (~26Mb) could be roughly equated to being able to run one less (lightweight) activity at a time (Sugar generally starts to lockup, force kill activities, and/or reboot in these cases).

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Perhaps if you want to set a bounty it should be for testing the feasibility of adding such a feature to XO-1 level hardware? If it can be demonstrated it can be done in a way that doesn't have a (noticeable) negative impact, you might get more people on board for attempting to ship such a feature.

Regards,
--Gary

> Regards,
> 
> -Mike
> 
> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 3:05 AM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 03:58:58PM +0430, Mike Dawson wrote:
>>> Is that bountysource.com ?
>> 
>> I don't know, sorry.
>> 
>>> I guess this looks like we're talking
>>> about a week of work to get it done.
>> 
>> That's just my estimate, others may differ.
>> 
>>> I will check out these bounty
>>> sites this evening - but mine is up there?
>> 
>> I don't understand the question, sorry.
>> 
>>> Other deployments?
>> 
>> I don't understand the question, sorry.
>> 
>>> We all want it... Isn't $100 if you're on the ground pretty good value
>>> just for the peace and quiet time we can get by people playing with
>>> their colours instead of complaining about this one?
>> 
>> No, I'm not convinced of the value.  There's much value in complaints
>> and dealing with complaints in the relationship between learners and
>> educators.  That interaction teaches much.  I'd like to know from a
>> scientific analysis how many learners state a desire to change the
>> colours, and how many of them have had experience with other systems
>> (such as mobile phones) that allow customisation of that.
>> 
>> --
>> James Cameron
>> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
>> 
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