[Sugar-devel] [Design] [Patches] New Toolbars in Activities

[Simon Schampijer]

On 03/13/2011 10:46 AM, Gary Martin wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
> On 10 Mar 2011, at 18:54, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>
>> On 03/10/2011 01:13 PM, Sebastian Silva wrote:
>>> Hello / Hola,
>>>
>>> As some of you know I started working with Activity Central last week,
>>> as an Activity Developer.
>>> My tasks will be to improve our Activities and also I consider, make
>>> life easier for activity developers.
>>>
>>> I'm looking forward to sharing more of what we do and have already
>>> signed up with the Activities Team.
>>>
>>> My first contribution is to update the toolbars in several activities.
>>> In the process I've run into some design decisions. In particular, with
>>> activities with few actions, updating the toolbar concealed the actions
>>> behind a ToolbarButton (see Get Books, for example). This did not seem
>>> right, so I took the liberty of moving main actions to the main toolbar.
>>>> From
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/New_Toolbar_Design#Benefit_to_Sugar -
>>> /"Make process of switching between toolbars more clear, use tool
>>> buttons that are showing all the time (in main toolbar), i.e., having
>>> Close/Help buttons visible all the time could be very useful."/ seems to
>>> support my decision.
>>>
>>> I've updated
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/TODO#Activity_Feature_Requests with
>>> the following.
>>> Activity Git repo with patches Comment
>>> Typing Turtle
>>> git://git.sugarlabs.org/~icarito/typing-turtle/typing-turtle-icarito.git
>>> DONE. Waiting for merge request.
>>> StopWatch git://git.sugarlabs.org/stopwatch/stopwatch.git DONE. Moved
>>> Share and Keep buttons to main toolbar.
>>> Help git://git.sugarlabs.org/~icarito/help/help-newui.git DONE. Put
>>> navigation in main bar (like in Browse). Waiting for merge request.
>>> Distance git://git.sugarlabs.org/distance/distance.git DONE by dirakx.
>>> Maze git://git.sugarlabs.org/~icarito/maze/icaritos-mainline.git DONE.
>>> Moved Share to main bar. Waiting for merge request.
>>> Get Books
>>> git://git.sugarlabs.org/~icarito/get-books/icaritos-mainline.git DONE.
>>> Moved book actions to main toolbar. Waiting for merge request.
>>> Words - Working on iticarito
>>> <http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Icarito>13:00, 10 March 2011 (EST).
>>> The UI can be improved.
>>> Jukebox - Working on iticarito
>>> <http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Icarito>13:00, 10 March 2011 (EST).
>>>
>>> I'd appreciate some feedback and peer review - as well as attention to
>>> the pending merge requests. Also on the dev workflow.
>>>
>>> Thanks, I'm happy to finally contribute code again.
>>>
>>> Sebastian
>>
>> Hi Sebastian,
>>
>> thanks for your work!
>>
>> I remember that we had defined some guidelines when using the new toolbars.
>>
>> So if I remember correctly (Gary feel free to correct me) we agreed that for simple activities the options can be moved to the main toolbar. Some things should be considered here (can be seen in the screenshot attached and the code is in [1]):
>>
>> - left should be the activity icon with the name in the palette
>> - then the other options (title, sharing, keep) left aligned
>> - the sharing button is made insensitive (but shown) if sharing is not implemented (self.max_participants = 1)
>>
>> I think we have not writing those guidelines down yet ([2] does not say anything about it and as well I could not find that info in any design page). Gary, what would be the best place to keep this info?
>
> Yes, the new toolbar design is an addition needed for the Sugar HIG update/rework. Plan is to take a static snapshot (a fixed readonly document) of the HIG as it stands on the wiki, and then update/rework the wiki HIG. Thanks for the reminder about the special case for minimal/simple activities (I'll need to go back and dig out the old discussions).
>
> --Gary

AFAIR, I did code the help activity based on the discussions back then. 
This is the closest documentation I have :)

Regards,
    Simon