Re: [sugar] Copy/Paste icon colour (Re: A Sugar TODO List, of Sorts)
Digging this up from the past as I attempt to clean out my inbox... On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:00, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: • Color copy/paste buttons in activities Which colors should take? Just the local colors? I've always been unclear about the purpose of this, and have not seen an explanation – always thought the coloured icon looked out of place in the toolbar. Anyone know the reason/metaphor that makes colouring it so important? When a clipping is made, it appears in the Frame as an icon, rendered in a specific XO color pair. Having clippings in various colors can help to make the clipboard a bit more engaging, and aid in identifying the correct one in the absence of (much needed) previews. The basic approach to coloring would be to color the copy button in the color of the activity it resides in, and color the paste button the color of the currently selected clipping in the Frame. However, the greater potential is reached when activities support it directly. For instance, the Record activity might turn the copy button to the colors of the currently selected photo. Should the Write activity ever keep track of exactly who wrote what, it could color the icon the colors of the person who wrote the selected block of text. In the case of a multiple selection, the colors would revert back to those of the activity. It might also be useful to return the button to white when there is no selection at all... - Eben ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Copy/Paste icon colour (Re: A Sugar TODO List, of Sorts)
On 22 Apr 2008, at 17:56, Eben Eliason wrote: On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:00, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: • Color copy/paste buttons in activities Which colors should take? Just the local colors? I've always been unclear about the purpose of this, and have not seen an explanation – always thought the coloured icon looked out of place in the toolbar. Anyone know the reason/metaphor that makes colouring it so important? When a clipping is made, it appears in the Frame as an icon, rendered in a specific XO color pair. Having clippings in various colors can help to make the clipboard a bit more engaging, and aid in identifying the correct one in the absence of (much needed) previews. The basic approach to coloring would be to color the copy button in the color of the activity it resides in, and color the paste button the color of the currently selected clipping in the Frame. However, the greater potential is reached when activities support it directly. For instance, the Record activity might turn the copy button to the colors of the currently selected photo. Should the Write activity ever keep track of exactly who wrote what, it could color the icon the colors of the person who wrote the selected block of text. In the case of a multiple selection, the colors would revert back to those of the activity. It might also be useful to return the button to white when there is no selection at all... H, you haven't really sold me the real end utility for all the effort needed to make that feature work reliably :-) It would need to be consistent across all activities to be discoverable, and even then perhaps 90%+ of the time the clipping will default to your local XO colour. So – just to check I understand – if I join a record activity with 2 others, the activity icon I see will be the colour of whoever's XO started the activity; copy will be the colour of whoever's media I currently have selected; and paste would be the colour of the last clipping made. If the plan was to also support sharable** clippings, I would understand the extra need for colorising – but that's probably just another feature to slow down other much more critical dev work. **hovering over a clipping could reveal an option for share with... could act as a way to transfer all kinds of things depending on what Sugar allowed you to clip (perhaps even an activity or an activity bundle from the Journal***). ***question, will .xo bundles continue to appear in the new Journal Design like they used to (always though that looked a little messy), or will downloaded .xo bundles only appear in the Home view ring/list? - Gary ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Copy/Paste icon colour (Re: A Sugar TODO List, of Sorts)
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 12:56:54PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote: On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:00, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: • Color copy/paste buttons in activities Which colors should take? Just the local colors? I've always been unclear about the purpose of this, and have not seen an explanation – always thought the coloured icon looked out of place in the toolbar. Anyone know the reason/metaphor that makes colouring it so important? When a clipping is made, it appears in the Frame as an icon, rendered in a specific XO color pair. Having clippings in various colors can help to make the clipboard a bit more engaging, and aid in identifying the correct one in the absence of (much needed) previews. Eben, usually your ideas make sense to me. Maybe I am missing something, but I don't understand your idea. What the clipboard needs is previews. Does coloring a clipping with the source XS color pair add anything if there is already a preview? ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Copy/Paste icon colour (Re: A Sugar TODO List, of Sorts)
This is absolutely not intended to mitigate the need for previews at all...that is, in fact the next thing I might look into in my part-time hacking of sugar, since it's a blatant omission and dearly needed. However, I think that the coloring will neatly compliment the previews. The core concept to consider is that identity is, at least loosely, tied to colors in Sugar. If Alice sends Bob a story she wrote, it will appear in Alice's colors in Bob's Journal. This metaphor is also used in general for shared activities. The real point is that this identity mechanism needs to be carried through the UI as much as possible. In Record, I would expect that Alice's pink/purple photo would appear in her colors if I chose to save it directly to my Journal. Likewise, if I were to drag Alice's pink/purple photo to the clipboard, I would expect the resulting clipping to appear in her colors. My hope is to extend this, to the extent possible, to the copy/paste paradigm so that these identities get passed around the interface, onto the clipboard, and into the Journal. While colors obviously don't serve as a unique identifier for a person, nor form a true identity, they do serve to highlight the collaborative aspect of the UI and make the entire interface much more engaging. I want to do everything we can to make that evident. In the worst case, I think we can always have clippings take the colors of the activity they came from, which actually makes some sense anyway. Eg. If I tear a small corner of blue paper, the shred I tore off remains blue. Only if activities choose, and it's convenient (Record is an example where not much extra work would need to be done to make this happen), do I expect we might have a smarter way to assign the colors based on the selection. - Eben On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 7:36 PM, Joshua N Pritikin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 12:56:54PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote: On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:00, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: • Color copy/paste buttons in activities Which colors should take? Just the local colors? I've always been unclear about the purpose of this, and have not seen an explanation – always thought the coloured icon looked out of place in the toolbar. Anyone know the reason/metaphor that makes colouring it so important? When a clipping is made, it appears in the Frame as an icon, rendered in a specific XO color pair. Having clippings in various colors can help to make the clipboard a bit more engaging, and aid in identifying the correct one in the absence of (much needed) previews. Eben, usually your ideas make sense to me. Maybe I am missing something, but I don't understand your idea. What the clipboard needs is previews. Does coloring a clipping with the source XS color pair add anything if there is already a preview? ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Copy/Paste icon colour (Re: A Sugar TODO List, of Sorts)
On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:00, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: • Color copy/paste buttons in activities Which colors should take? Just the local colors? I've always been unclear about the purpose of this, and have not seen an explanation – always thought the coloured icon looked out of place in the toolbar. Anyone know the reason/metaphor that makes colouring it so important? Gary ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
