After spending some time with touch based devices, I have to agree with Scott. Yes, you can "bolt on" support for single touch to many activities, but doing a good job of supporting multitouch is typically a complete UI redesign.
We are trying to get an accelerometer into the design as well as touch, better supporting these new UIs. On Jun 3, 2010, at 1:45 PM, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > I strongly encourage the Sugar team to consider rethinking the Sugar > UI from the ground up for touch. The "simple" port is likely to yield > a very unsatisfactory experience; "fat fingers" are just not precise > pointing devices, and a lot of gestures which seem intuitive for a > mouse don't really work for touch. In the same vein, there are many > finger gestures which are intuitive which aren't being exploited in > the mouse-based UI. And, of course, the whole "pop up a keyboard" to > type thing is weird now; keyboard shortcuts and special "home", "view > source", etc, keys don't work as well. Everything needs a place on > screen. > > My suggestion would be to first convene a "ground up rethink" of what > a touch-based Sugar could be. Then, realizing that the best is the > enemy of the good and the realistic limits on Sugar development, draw > up a "from here to there" plan concentrating on grabbing the > lowest-hanging fruit first (perhaps a redesign of the home screen, or > rethinking palette menus, or whatever) and embarking on an incremental > strategy to adapt. > > Software engineers like to think in terms of generalities, and "what > can we do that's not too hard", but I'm suggesting that's *not* the > most fruitful way to approach adaptation to touch. The engineering > thinking should be *second*. Design and user experience should be > first. Every designer should probably be required to have spent > serious time with an iPhone or iPad or touchscreen phone (preferably > from a variety of different touch-based OSes) to be sure we're not > just mapping mouse onto touch. Ideally, take some time to give an > iPad to a 3-6 yr old and watch and learn. The result should be a > *book*, which describes the ideal UI. That will be the long term > (think, next decade!) goals for Sugar. > > I'd personally like to see the Sugar team come up with bold ideas that > go *beyond* what we're seeing in Android and iPhone OS; in particular, > how to best enable *content creation*. We've always said we'd like to > see a movie editing application in Sugar. Concentrating on what > Record or Etoys or TurtleArt might look like with a touch-based UI > would be bold thinking that would radically advance Sugar's mission. > What does it mean to have the entire environment written in Python, if > Python is clumsy and hard to use with a touch-based interface? Maybe > the direct-manipulation model of Etoys is a more natural fit? What > does "view source" mean in a touch-enabled world? > > I look forward to exciting times and crazy great ideas! Yep! Cheers, wad --scott > > -- > ( http://cscott.net/ ) > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep