[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Etoys 4.1

[Gary Martin]

Hi Bert,

On 31 Aug 2010, at 21:46, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> On 31.08.2010, at 20:07, Gary Martin wrote:
> 
>> Hi Bert,
>> 
>> On 30 Aug 2010, at 10:50, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> 
>>> This is the first beta release of Etoys 4.1.
>>> 
>>> The biggest change is that stopping the Etoys activity will no longer save to the Journal. To save, you will have to press the keep button. The octagonal stop button is replaced by a circular exit button to indicate the new behavior. It puts up a warning before actually quitting.
>> 
>> :-(( but I'm sure this was a really tough decision to make.
>> 
>> Do you have a screen shot of the new UI and warning dialogue that I can easily take a look at?
>> 
>> My first gut reaction (not having seen it yet) is that the Keep button is a real problem generally (and causes confusion and misunderstanding in Sugar). Habitually training kids to click that icon each time before exiting will, for all other activities, generate many confusing duplicate Journal entries over time and make matters even worse.
>> 
>> For the Etoys case, as a workaround for not knowing your clean/dirty state, I think having the regular Stop UI button that when clicked _always_ displayed some sort of "Do you want to Keep the changes to this project in the Journal?" Keep/Don't Keep dialogue. That way kids can just keep clicking the Stop button without worry in all activities, and it's just that the Etoys pop-us up and extra dialogue when they do click Stop there.
>> 
>> Apologies if this is already what your new "warning before actually quitting" dialogue does :)
>> 
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
> 
> Well, you can try it in sugar-jhbuild. 
> 
> Or on your XO or SoaS:
> 
> 	http://etoys.laptop.org/

Sorry for taking so long to get to this (FWIW I did try a while back on an XO-1 with a recent Dextrose build but could not yum upgrade as the yum cache was limited to 49Mb and this Etoys needed 53Mb).

> As usual, the Keep button saves a copy in the Journal. Unlike in Etoys before, it now brings up a dialog to edit the project details, followed by a dialog to chose the save location - either the Journal (preselected) or to "the cloud" (Squeakland).

This dialogue is pretty scary, actually it's two dialogues when you click on the keep toolbar icon, the first is a naming dialogue form:

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The second is a publishing dialogue:

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That's quite a lot for a kid to get through, the current Sugar naming dialogue is bad enough and we are trying to get rid of it as there have been quite a few complaints ? I think Simon usually disables the dialogue when he teaches with Sugar.

If this is to be the usual save workflow, publishing a project to Squeekland would seem to be a separate task/toolbar feature especially given the login, registration and internet requirement that many won't have.

> On repeated saving the dialog is not shown again.

Yes, but now you get a new Journal entry every time each named the same thing, there seems no way to update the one entry you just resumed to work on (the usual Sugar behaviour).

> Clicking the Exit button does not offer to save, it just warns about losing unsaved changes.

Unfortunately it says this every time, even if you've just clicked the keep button and saved, but this is back to the original issue of Etoys not being able to make a call on user state change since the save.

> There is no Stop button. This should avoid confusion with other activities.

As mentioned in the other thread, I'd suggest:

- the normal Stop icon should be used (ideally it would be placed on the far right, swapped with the fullscreen button)
- clicking it would raise a naming dialogue (not all your fields are needed for Journal, just name, description, and tags)
- options on the dialogue for Save, Don't Save, Cancel
- Save creates a Journal entry if working on a new un-saved activity, or overwrites the existing entry if working on a resumed activity
- Don't Save is the new behaviour you were trying to enable

With the above Stop button changes I think the Keep can stay as is, it does behave similar to keep else where but just with the added publishing destination dialogue step, most users could just stick with using the Stop button as they do else where (just with the extra dialogue to go through each time).

FWIW, if you do decide to keep the Stop menu/dialogue as it is in the beta, it should not really be using Yes/No text, should be Quit/Cancel ? oh actually for Sugar it should at least be "Are you sure you want to stop Etoys? (the project will NOT be saved if you stop) Stop/Cancel". But I'd much rather a dialogue here that allowed saving ;)

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Regards,
--Gary 

> - Bert -
> 
> 
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