[sugar] The limits of Mesh View

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:51 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
<ypod at mit.edu> wrote:
> What are the practical limits at the moment?
>  How many icons can we fit at a maximum?

I'll give a somewhat vague response (mainly because even I'm not sure)
to kick things off.  To begin with, the answer depends in large part
to the topography of the collaboration space.  The view is much more
scalable when the grouping factor of XOs is high, such that some
activities cluster a number of them into a ring.  This organizing
factor makes things scalable, and was a key element of our design
phase.  If it turns out that most collaborations involve only 2 or 3
XOs, and very few involve 5 or more, we won't hit the type of layout
we envisioned early on.  That said, I think the rough limits are going
to lie between 50 and 100 (I said I'd be vague!) icons in the view at
any one time before it becomes to difficult to manage.  In our initial
sketches, which allowed up to 25 or so ("class size") XOs to be in a
given activity, we could handle 150 or more while retaining some
visual clarity.

Of course, we're working on ideas for improving scalability in
general, such that the entire neighborhood is "accessible" via the
search capability even when only a (potentially small!) subset of that
neighborhood gets shown in the view by default.  Additionally, we
intend to add list views to all of the zoom levels, which will provide
a sortable, searchable, filterable list of all activities, people, and
devices present for the more extreme cases.

- Eben