[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Sugar for smart devices

[Christian Stroetmann]

Hi Gary
> Hi Christian,
>
> On 18 Sep 2014, at 10:10, Christian Stroetmann<stroetmann at ontolab.com>  wrote:
>
>> Aloha
>>
>> Maybe somebody mentioned the following solution already on an other channel.
>> If not, then I would like to show two images of the activity screen as examples. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) works like the home screen of a well known smart device, which might be of use for adaptions of Sugar that run on small devices with small screens (e.g. Sugarizer and Sugarfox).
>>
>> The first image [1] shows a common desktop as displayed on a laptop for children or a tablet computer.
>> The second image [2] shows a screen of a smartphone or a phone tablet (phablet) for example.
>> The GUI could also be scaled in such a way that it fits on the screen of a smartwatch, on which I am working with iRaiment as well since a year or so.
>>
>> For sure, the icons have to be arranged in a more dense way, but these images are just sketches.
> Nice, I like the mockups. There have been similar layouts in the past using a range of patterns – the layout code was originally designed so that it was (fairly) easy to go in and add your own, or enable some of the other hidden ones. Your layout would need tweaks to the code to support variable icon sizes, the code currently selects a single size to layout all icons.
>
>  From a very small screen point of view, this layout only starts to make sense if the user can dynamically scroll around the view, bringing the wanted icon nearer the centre where it is scaled larger and is easier to interact with. In the past Sugar UI has unfortunately had to be very frugal with any animations due to the (low power) devices it's been designed for (and often limited support of hardware graphics acceleration in the open source stack).
Yes, indeed and I have addressed both the dynamic scroll and the power 
with this adaption of another GUI, which leads to the question below. 
Any guess? The answer is very easy and will be given later. ;D
Actually, I am more concerned about the adaption of the activities for a 
small screen like smartphones have, which have a dimension of around 5" 
+/- 0.5".

One word to the low power devices. We are now a decade further and 
devices that cost around 40 U.S. Dollar can handle such GUIs easily. 
Said this, I do not think that it still makes sense to be so frugal in 
relation with multimedia.

Christian
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>> By the way: Who has already recognized the original GUI?
>>
>>
>>
>> Have fun in the sun
>> Christian Stroetmann
>>
>> [1] www.ontomax.com/images/multimedia/sugar-activity-smart_devices-01.jpg
>> [2] www.ontomax.com/images/multimedia/sugar-activity-smart_devices-03.jpg
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