[Sugar-devel] multi-homeview feature

[Walter Bender]

I did a clean [1] up of Daniel Francis's Multi Home View feature [2]
yesterday and in the process tried to address two issues:

(1) The original code had many redundancies. The new version is
reasonably tight (although I am certain to get push back in the review
process).

(2) There was some concern that this feature would cause confusion
among our users (despite its being written in response to several
requests from the field).

To address #2, I made the number of home views configurable. By
default, there is just one home view, as is currently the case. A
gconf settting is used to add additional home views. (In gconf, I
maintain a list of icons to use for the view toolbar and to use for
marking favorites in the list view.) A view is generated for each icon
in the list.

I posit that this is a reasonable compromise: the default behavior
does not change, but deployments that want to exploit this feature can
use gconftool to set custom icons and views. (And since it is in user
space, enterprising users can also customize the number of views.)

Reactions?

-walter

[1] https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/38
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Multiple_home_views


--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org