Hi Mikus,

On 4 Jul 2010, at 20:23, Mikus Grinbergs <mi...@bga.com> wrote:

>>>> some current (ongoing) future design changes will remove this issue 
>>>> completely with a
>>>> full screen screen dialogue for deciding new/resume. One click on a home 
>>>> view activity
>>>> displays a gallery/journal like display of past work or a new blank 
>>>> template
>> 
>> Users ended up launching new activities most of the time bringing the machine
>> to it's knees, filling the Journal with junk entries, and then not being able
>> to find what they want when they do look in the Journal to resume something.
> 
> What this design change will do is deliberately introduce a 'pause' into
> the process of launching an Activity -- to force the user to evaluate
> "why am I launching?"  What I am wondering is whether "force decision
> before launching" is more user-friendly than simply "launch".
> 
> If the problem is "users filling up the machine",

No, sorry if I wasn't clear in my explanation, it's not users filling up their 
disk space that this design effort is trying to resolve (most Sugar activities 
have very small Journal entries). Having 'start new' as the default home 
behaviour leads to many concurrently open activities, often bringing the 
machine to a grinding halt due to OOM. The Journal also fills up with more junk 
entries (making it harder to search though and find work to resume from).  

> will making it more
> difficult to launch a new instance be an adequate solution ?

The new design strives to make resuming and 'start new' behaviours of equal 
priority in the UI. The current version of Sugar has resume as the default 
behaviour (since 0.84) in an attempt to resolve the flood of deployment 
feedback about the above mentioned lockups due to OOM and Journal spam. We now 
have feedback that 'start new' is too hidden and that kids are often resuming 
recent work and manually erasing the canvas to start something new (I've seen 
this happen first hand, child asks in Paint how to make a big brush, and then 
paints out their previous work with white; also I've started to see requests 
for activities to have a clear all tool button for much the same reason). 

So the new design work will make 'start new' more visible than with the 
currently released Sugar.

> Will the
> kid who wants to make a new drawing on Tuesday be content with resuming
> the activity he used Monday -- thereby wiping his drawing from Monday ?

She might want to paint some more on Mondays painting, or start something new. 
We're trying to put that choice equally up front for her before the activity 
launches, though I accept this adds an extra click/decision to every activity 
invocation. FWIW: We could leave in the alt-click 'start new' home short cut 
for those expert users who know they want a fresh activity session and no 
dialogue.

> Forcing a decision on every launch may work -- but there still needs to
> be a user-helpful way to address "I've filled up the machine" when that
> happens -- for those who nevertheless persist in overusing "new launch".

Yes, this is a separate design issue we are not trying to fix with this 
specific work. There are already a couple of features. One is that a warning 
dialogue pops up when you've filled N% of your flash, and switches you to the 
Journal and asks for you to remove things — it's better than nothing but I've 
not found it useful so far, it keeps dragging you back to the Journal view, 
usually I'm trying to get back to Terminal to stop a yum, a git clone, a file 
curl/wget :) The other is I think something new Bernie has been experimenting 
with, basically a last chance saloon script that auto deletes some activities, 
so that the machine can at least be booted.

Regards,
--Gary  

P.S. We keep slipping on a date/time for the next irc #sugar-meeting design 
meeting, folks are most welcome, Christian has some nice mockups he's been 
polishing up for publication. We're trying again for tomorrow/Monday, but no 
time confirmed just yet.

> [Would an "ultimate" design propose to make the machine be the master
> over the user -- and employ this full screen launch dialogue to refuse
> launch whenever the machine approaches "being brought to its knees" ??]
> 
> mikus
> 
> 
> p.s.
> The Journal user-interface was invented, with a "filter" capability.
> Now a full screen dialogue user-interface would be duplicating what the
> Journal can show.  I myself am not comfortable with duplication.
> 
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