[Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] DESIGN: Proposed UI simplifications

[Gary Martin]

On 21 Oct 2010, at 11:26, Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> 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.

+1, ideally we would replace this with Walter's patch to raise the details view within any activity for editing via the top frame menu for each activity:

	https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Write_to_journal_anytime

> 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!

+1, sounds reasonable. Can you file a ticket for it.

> 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.

+1.

--Gary

> 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/
> 
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