At a recent meeting with Nicholas, some reservations about the redesign of Sugar were brought up, specifically with regard to the layout of the Home view. While the broader shift in perspective which places activities and other active status elements in the Frame was unanimously welcomed as a Good Thing, the presentation of the activities within Home was not.
The main issue of concern was one of scalability; The circular arrangement suggested an inherent finite quality which runs counter to our goals of allowing children to create and explore as much as possible. After experimenting with a number of layouts, it became clear that a more traditional freeform view maximizes potential use of the available space, retains the XO at the center (which is core to the zoom metaphor and reflects the philosophy of child ownership of laptops), 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. 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! - Eben 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. One can imagine many more, and more importantly, the possibility for an extensible system which allows kids to create their own custom layouts. _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
