Okay, I'm jumping in the "ring" so to speak (the third time today I have made this pun, ugh).
I believe there are some issues with both the new design and this new new design, and propose to solve them in one fell swoop. I also promote tagging to a first class organizational strategy. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Wade/Ideas/Activity_Management Best, Wade PS- If you look carefully, you will see that I've also replaced your home view with a spacial Journal! On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Martin Dengler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:08:29PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote: >> [new home view] > > Eben, I have great respect for you and the people involved. My gut > reaction to the new design, however, was just: it's not beautiful. > > I'd like to repeat clearly: > > This design is not beautiful. > > The ring[1] was beautiful, and the redesigned activity circle/ring[2] > too, but this design is not beautiful. It lacks a sense of "macro" / > unifying design/layout that the previous two had, and it looks like a > mess :(. > >> [the Home view presentation was not a Good Thing; the] main issue of >> concern was one of scalability . . . > > What what?? Creation is (journal-wise) nouns; the ring / activities > view is (was) verbs. I've not idea about design metaphor and the > application thereof, but this seems a large change (not necessarily > bad) for a silly reason: scalability. Silly I say, because: this > design is no useful way more scalable. A ring of 50 icons is a better > organization than a free-form desktop of 50 icons. Sure, they can be > dragged around to make sense of them, but...inherently more scalable > (or more beautiful than your last designs) it is not. > >> After experimenting with a number of layouts, it became clear that a >> more traditional freeform view maximizes potential use of the >> available space . . . > > Why is space maximization the most important goal? Clearly a > free-form view is *not* going to result in the maximal packing, but a > somewhat-overlapping grid/hexagonal view. I find this whole > scalability argument not compelling. > >> . . . retains the XO at the center (which is core to >> the zoom metaphor and reflects the philosophy of child ownership of >> laptops) . . . > > Sure! > >> . . . and also provides, via drag'n'drop, the ability for kids to >> further personalize their Home by arranging and categorizing >> activities as they see fit. > > Personalization is good. > >> While we contend that the notion of >> favorites is still a powerful organizational tool, and therefore >> propose to keep it in the new designs, this free view scales well >> enough to prevent the need for using them if one doesn't wish to. >> >> Please observe the new design mockups on the wiki at >> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Activity_Management for further >> details. As code freeze is rapidly approaching and these changes are >> slated for the August release aside the rest of the redesign, your >> feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks! > > Feedback/summary of the above: keep the last design with its favorite > activity ring, but perhaps stick the shaded ring of the design prior > to *that* behind the favorite-ed activities, perhaps. But there are > probably a lot of designs more beautiful that this new proposal, so > don't use this new proposal (subject to the "PS" section caveats > below). > >> - Eben > > Martin > >> PS. While considering the implementation details of the new Home >> design, an interesting extension of this idea was proposed: a >> modular layout system. It would take as input the coordinates of the >> dropped icon (and those of all others on screen as well), and output >> coordinates for where the icons should actually be drawn. (We could >> also include metadata such as name, tags, etc. to allow sorting, >> grouping and such.) > >> The simplest layout is the identity function, naturally. A slightly >> more interesting layout would be the identity function, with some >> extra jiggle logic to prevent overlapping icons. Another possibility, >> of course, is to compute the angle between the center of the screen >> and the coordinate of the dropped icon, compute a radius r based on >> the total number of icons, and then draw all of the dropped icons in a >> ring of radius r with the newly dropped one at the appropriate >> position in the ring. > > Wait, I've changed my mind - *this* is the way to go. Forget all that > stuff I said above ;). > >> One can imagine many more, and more importantly, the possibility >> for an extensible system which allows kids to create their own >> custom layouts. > > This would be *super* cool. It's quite high up the gradient of > customizability, but could be a useful amount/degree below the > difficulty of having kids implement their own gtk theme. > > _______________________________________________ > Sugar mailing list > Sugar@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar > > _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
