#8611 NORM Not Tri: New Sugar provides insufficient feedback to users about which Activities are running

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#8611: New Sugar provides insufficient feedback to users about which Activities
are running
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 Reporter:  bemasc            |         Owner:  Eben         
     Type:  defect            |        Status:  new          
 Priority:  normal            |     Milestone:  Not Triaged  
Component:  interface-design  |       Version:  not specified
 Keywords:                    |   Next_action:  never set    
 Verified:  0                 |     Blockedby:               
 Blocking:                    |  
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 In old Sugar, the list of Activity instances currently running was
 immediately obvious from the Home screen.  Users still tended to open up
 too many Activity instances, though, because launching was so slow that
 they assumed that the launch request had not been received, and clicked
 again to start a new one.

 Under new Sugar, clicking an Activity icon immediately blanks the screen,
 thus providing clear immediate feedback that the launch request was
 received correctly.  However, the user is no longer presented with a
 persistent list of open instances, and the overhead of opening the frame
 to check is sufficiently high that many children apparently tend to open
 new instances repeatedly from the Home View.  This results in many
 instances running simultaneously, which leads to system instability and
 OOM effects, not to mention the confusion of half-finished efforts.

 I think there is a good, simple solution to this.  From the Home View,
 each Activity icon for which there is at least one instance currently
 running should be marked appropriately.  This is similar to the design of
 the Mesh View, in which the currently selected wireless network's circle
 is marked to distinguish it.  From the Home View, if the user clicks on
 the icon of a running Activity, the user should be returned to one of the
 running instances.  If the user truly wishes to launch a new, parallel
 instance, they may do so as an option from the drop-down palette.  The
 palette should also show a list of all currently-running instances by
 title, so that the user may select one.

 This approach is extremely similar to Mac OS X's approach, in which
 launchers typically return the user to the current instance, and running
 multiple parallel instances of a single application is discouraged by the
 UI.  In our case, by providing easy access to all current Write instances
 by name when I hover over the Write launcher, we further improve the
 usability of this approach.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8611>
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