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.
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