-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Suppose that I am participating in 3 shared activity sessions, all public. ~ I am switching back and forth between them, perhaps copying things from one to another, and occasionally checking in on the third. The current mesh view design shows my XO icon as attached only to the activity which is currently shown on my screen. I feel strongly that this is the wrong design choice. Instead, my XO icon should be shown next to all the activity instances of which I am a member.
Abstractly, placing my XO next to only one activity instance conveys the wrong information. Just because I am currently viewing a single activity does not mean I am not an active participant in many activities. There may be activities for which being an important participant only requires very occasional participation. For example, I may be the lead author on a team paper, but not shown in that activity because I am only checking it every hour or so. The current design is a privacy violation. IM programs typically provide optional idleness detection, and many users disable it entirely. When the user enables idleness detection, the user may opt either to show idleness on the basis of total system activity (e.g. whether screensaver is active) or on the basis of IM activity. There is never an option to indicate whether each IM window has focus at any given time, because users do not want everyone else to know whether they are looking at that particular window. For a classic example, see http://bash.org/?365072 . In a school setting, this visualization directly enforces a harsh classroom discipline, in which the teacher demands that everyone look only at one particular activity, and can tell immediately if they look somewhere else. The current design is tremendously inefficient. Every state change, like moving between activities, causes O(N) work in the best case (and currently O(N^2)). In a classroom of 30 active students, updating status once a minute results in a broadcast every two seconds on average, with many collisions, grinding the network to a halt. Many of our classrooms have far more than 30 students. If the user has used 3 activities in the past minute, the resulting visualization is also misleading at best. Making a single XO appear multiple times in the mesh view is not confusing, because each of these XO's is reduced in size, and clearly represents the association of a user with a particular activity. It is much more confusing for a user to look in the mesh view and see that her own XO icon is not attached to the activities that she is sharing. Please clarify the mesh view, improve the user's privacy, and reduce network congestion, by not sending notifications regarding which activity has focus in the window manager, and instead showing each XO icon next to each activity in which it is participating. - --Ben -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIB5AyUJT6e6HFtqQRAjk2AJ4oYC7ctEl2ln6qI4AtjSriIzKa3QCfU10D OLZWOTmf1pDW3a6yk/ekqUI= =O6KA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
