Active activities as Widgets

[Gerard J. Cerchio]

Gerard J. Cerchio wrote:
> Eben Eliason wrote:
>   
>> Can you elaborate on the inadequacies you see in this design?  It
>> would be useful as we move forward with considerations for the
>> ubiquitous chat interface.  Unless specifically necessary to the
>> activity in some fashion, we'd prefer to depend on this interface,
>> preventing the need for individual activities to implement custom
>> solutions which can come at a loss of consistency and a gain in
>> activity size and duplicated code.
>>
>> - Eben
>>
>>
>>   
>>     
> There are some activities where the chat is an integral part of the 
> participants' experience. In my case, chatter during the Go game may be 
> nonexistent to multiple lines of interactive tutorial per move to 
> razzing and praise from any of the observers. This is why I plan to have 
> a mute button that mutes all chat from observers. Unchecked, the button 
> allows kibitzing from all XO's in the buddy panel that joined the PlayGo 
> activity.
>
> This is not the functionality that I interpreted from Bert's comment:
>
>    I thought this was intended to be a feature similar to the frame (and
>    actually summoned by the frame key), layered on top of the activity,
>    so it actually would work for *all* activities, Python or not.
>
>    - Bert -
>
> I may be wrong in interpreting the ubiquitous chat interface as a full 
> screen overlay on top of the application where the child must either 
> chat into the overlay or switch modes to play the game. Are you 
> suggesting that the ubiquitous chat can be relegated to its own panel on 
> the activity's screen so there is no mode switching between chat and the 
> "underlayed" activity?  Would either of the two (or more) participants 
> in the activity be able to mute observers? I find both of these 
> functionalities fundamental to the activity experience and the tutored 
> activity experience.
>
> Also, being that most of the video processing is offloaded in the Geode, 
> I look forward to morphing the chat panel into a video call to my Go 
> opponent. The PlayGo application takes very little resource, so there is 
> plenty of ommf left over to run the video call. It would be the next 
> best thing to playing in the same room.
>
> - Gerard
>   
Eben, do you wish to enter a dialog on this?