[Etoys] A low floor "Paint" door into eToys

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:40:48 +0530,
K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 22 Nov 2008 12:48:36 am Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
> >   I haven't forgotten your suggestion, but it still doesn't have the
> > thing unfortunately.  But, I can show how you would do.  I made a
> > little Etoys project.  Download this:
> >
> >   http://dev.laptop.org/~yoshiki/etoys/SimplePaint.005.pr
> This is still modal.

  Well, nobody claimed that it solves this problem.

> I found young children (non-English) have trouble dealing 
> with such modal painting environments without "training". The paint tools are 
> not child-friendly.

  Do you mean that it can be fully non-modal?
  
> The tool cursors has no visual feedback of the picked 
> color.

  Yes.

> The circle cursor even has its hot spot at 10 O'clock instead of the 
> center.

  Yes.  That is easier to fix.

> The auto popup color panel is a major irritant.

  I think so, too.

> Just move the cursor 
> from the upper part of onion skin towards "clear" or "toss" to see what I 
> mean. Whatever happened to the principle of least astonishment?
> 
> Children learn to compensate for these irritants over time but is a modal 
> paint tool really necessary?

  Well, we aren't married to it.  I once advocated that we really
don't need the rainbow palette, but some 100 colors is enough (and
that makes color-sees easier).

> Many of the paint tool functions can be achieved 
> if we allow children to "embed" or "stamp" by a press-n-hold or lay pen 
> trails using hold-n-drag. A child can spend more time "thinking" than 
> worrying about missteps.

  Isn't holding a key a modal operation?

-- Yoshiki