[Sugar-devel] [FEATURE] [DESIGN] Display Device

[Gary Martin]

Hi Simon,

Just going through my sketches and raising a few older threads:

On 21 Aug 2012, at 13:44, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:

> Hi Gary,
> 
> thanks for having a look!
> 
> On 08/21/2012 02:34 PM, Gary Martin wrote:
>> Hi Simon,
>> 
>> On 21 Aug 2012, at 12:18, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> this Feature "Display Device" [1] has been proposed for 0.96 inclusion already but did not make it in due to time constraints. With touch the need to expose the 'take-screenshot' and 'adjust-brightness' options in the UI gets more prominent, that is why I want to propose this again for 0.98.
>>> 
>>> The part for the screenshot taking was already done, that part of the patch just needs to be re-based.
>> 
>> I'm not happy the design is ready yet for inclusion, some quick comments:
>> 
>>  - Use of the camera icon (especially in the device frame) suggests it involves camera hardware.
> 
> The icon is a placeholder. It should be an icon for the display.

Have a look at [1] for some variations on the theme.

> 
>>  - Is taking a screenshot really a feature that should be in the device section of the frame?
> 
> See below. I am happy to hear about other suggestions. At the moment I have no other one :/ Previous discussions did not bring something up neither [1].

So... two possible suggestions:

A) I might be able to trigger a screen shot from a maliit extended key, I'm thinking a long press of the "1" key could raise an extended palette (as used by accents) and include a 'take screen shot' trigger key (it would just send a regular key event up the chain to be caught further up). The current the screen shot mechanism already hides the OSK so this could work pretty much as the physical keyboard alt-1 does, taking a screenshot of whatever you had on screen minus the OSK. OT: This could also be a route to use for some other shortcuts where we have limited space to expose UI buttons (e.g. long press of space could have a view source cog option). The one hurdle is that maliit visible key labels == the character they trigger (except for special key actions that need hard coded into maliit, aka the language switch key that we need added at some point).

B) The current screen shot feature is already something you need to be shown or read about in the documentation i.e. not discoverable without external help, so we would not be regressing if we made the touch screen shot trigger something equally hidden like a long-press of the Display device icon... this is also quite similar to how Android have it in their UI (and better than iOS that have no visible UI for it at all, there you have to press the physical home and off buttons simultaneously).

>>  - The device frame is filling up fast and furious in this cycle, we already need to add an icon for raising the OSK, and an icon for controlling the hardware display brightness/monochrome mode.
>>  - The palette shown in the screen shot is named Display.
> 
> The Palette should contain as well the options for the brightness. At least that is what we discussed at one point. The Palette would be named something like 'Display', have an option for brightness and one for taking a screenshot.

Brightness is certainly the primary Display device feature needing a visible UI (especially for touch input). I've made some mockup/sketches around how the icon and palette could look as per the discussion so far [1], [2], [3], [4].

Regards,
--Gary

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Display_device_icons.jpg
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Display_device_location.png
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Candidate_Display_icon.jpg
[4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Mockup_Display_device_palette.jpg

> Regards,
>   Simon
> 
> [1] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-November/034372.html