[Sugar-devel] Testing Rotate in sugar-jhbuild

[Gary Martin]

Hi Walter,

On 20 Aug 2012, at 00:57, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Walter,
>> 
>> 
>> On 16 Aug 2012, at 16:53, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
>> 
>> In anybody want test how activities work with the screen rotated in
>> 
>> sugar-jhbuid,
>> 
>> can do in the terminal:
>> 
>> 
>> xrandr -o left
>> 
>> 
>> when your neck hurts, or you have finished...
>> 
>> 
>> xrandr -o normal
>> 
>> 
>> Gonzalo
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> 
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>> 
>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> 
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Works great. Check out
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/c/cb/Portfolio-27.xo which support
>> rotation. But I am curious why the stop button runs off the edge... it
>> would appear there is plenty of room for it.
>> 
>> 
>> Not sure if this is your issue (my land line has been down most of the day
>> and am on GSM network), but invisible separators still take space unless you
>> explicitly tell them not to:
>> 
>>    separator.set_size_request(0, -1)
>> 
>> So your separator factory might need a tweak. See Physics activity.py line
>> 103 for a working example.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>> 
>> 
>> -walter
>> 
>> --
>> Walter Bender
>> Sugar Labs
>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> 
> I've been thinking for quite some time that we need a new approach to
> the problem of toolbar items following off the end of the toolbar This
> problem will be greatly exacerbated by the more frequent use of screen
> rotate one would expect with more use of tablet mode on XO 4.0 Touch.
> Most activities have not taken into account the potential squeezing of
> the toolbar by 25% even of they take into consideration general
> resizing of the screen due to rotation.

I know this is a tough line to take, but we should file tickets against activities that overflow in portrait orientation – that includes Physics and Calculate ;)

It is quite an effort making a complicated multi-function Activity appear simple, but letting activity developers off the hook to pile on features without keeping their UI under control seems like a loosing direction to take. Max ten icons in the toolbar (that includes the Activity toolbar icon and the Stop toolbar icon). We've had decent sub-toolbar support in Sugar for a long time now, lets make sure we prioritising that primary tool bar space and putting the less used features into secondary toolbars.

Regards,
--Gary

> A simple solution would be to double the vertical size of the toolbar
> and wrap the icons onto a second row.
> 
> comments?
> 
> -walter
> -- 
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org