[Sugar-devel] DESIGN: Proposed UI simplifications

[Bernie Innocenti]

>From my experience with first-time Sugar users in Mozambique, I've come
up with a list of UI changes that would help:

1) EASY: kill the name picker that pops up when quitting
   activities. Nobody ever uses it, it's just annoying and confusing
   for new users who don't know how to dismiss it. Maybe one day
   someone will come out with a less intrusive UI for the same purpose,
   but for the time being we're much better off without anything.

2) EASY: kill the "Mute" function on the volume icon in the frame.
   I can't think of a useful use-case for it, and children often
   manage to turn on muting by simply clicking on the speaker icon
   (which is a lame UI, btw). If we remove this feature, we have to
   unconditionally unmute on startup!

3) MEDIUM: Figure out why so many control panels require restarting
   Sugar, and fix them not to. Because we use GConf for settings,
   we should be able to setup callbacks to be invoked on any change.

Removing existing features is always hard in free software, as there's
always some user who advocates in favor of keeping them. As consumers,
it's hard for us to cope with the sense of "loss", even if the feature
had no practical value for us.

If we can't get these proposals approved upstream, perhaps we can make
them configurable. IMHO, it sucks to add a knob every time we fail to
find consensus, but it's still a little better than maintaining off-tree
patches.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/