[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Cleaning up 0.86 Roadmap page

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Sayamindu Dasgupta schrieb:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Christoph
> Derndorfer<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>> Caroline Meeks schrieb:
>>> ==Avoid surplus Activity launching==
>>> Don't let the user keep opening activities until the machine crashes or
>>> is driven to its knees.  Make it less likely that a user who is
>>> impatient will end up opening multiple copies of an activity.
>>> * Priority C for GPA
>> +1
>>
>> In my (very) limited classroom experience this is quite an issue and out
>> of 20 children you will always have 2~3 which have launched several
>> activity instances bringing their XO to an absolute standstill.
>> Restarting Sugar takes quite a bit of time and very much disrupts the
>> classroom workflow.
>>
> 
>>From a technical perspective, could we use libunique[1] here ?
> -sdg-

I think that generally we don't want to forbid running multiple 
instances of an activity because there are many use cases where this 
makes sense.

What we much rather need (IMHO) is some sort of way to guess whether the 
user really wanted to launch a separate instance or not. A primitive 
heuristic could be to disable launching an activity while an instance of 
that same activity is being started.

Another, though related, issue is trying to keep users from launching 
too many activities at the same time. From my experience the XO-1 seems 
to handle approx. 4 activities in parallel quite well but quickly 
becomes unresponsive once more activities are launched. This is why I 
really liked the activity ring in the early days of Sugar as it gave 
some sort of visual feedback when too many activities were running at 
the same time.

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com