I liked the visual simplicity of the "launch circle" for Activities. I dislike having a "jungle" of Activities show up in the Home view.
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
I am not a kid. But I think a launch concept I've been using for more than 10 years on my desktop system could be incorporated into the Home-view page:
On my display I have a window which consists of a space for icons, with a line of "tabs" underneath it. As each "tab" is clicked, it shows in the upper space the icons assigned to that tab. I launch applications by clicking on one of the icons. [Thus launching consists of a sequence (a 'hierarchy'): (1) selecting a "tab", (2) selecting an "icon" brought up by that tab.]
This facility is very compact yet scalable - "vertical" expansion allows for multiple lines of "tabs" to use the same upper space for their icons, while "horizontal" expansion allows the lines of tabs themselves (and/or the upper space for icons) to be scrolled.
--------What could be done on the Home-view page (once the existing "ring" gets too crowded) is to *not* show some icons until an "enabling object" is clicked. By "expanding" only one "enabling object" at a time, the available space on the Home-view page gets multi-used -- providing lots of scalability. Since a "ring display of objects" looks good, clicking on an "enabling object" put into an inner ring could bring up an adjacent "outer ring segment" showing more icons.
[In what I am using on my desktop, the "enabling object" capability is provided by the "tab". In the proposal I made on the wiki Design page, that capability I had called the "palette root".]
mikus
<<inline: Tabbed.png>>
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