[sugar] The limits of Mesh View

[Eben Eliason]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>  Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:
>  | A full screen of icons would not be
>  | legible either, but was I just trying to explore the limits.
>
>  That's not exactly the limit.  Although the current designs don't call for
>  it, it would be easy enough to allow the mesh view to expand past the edge
>  of the screen, once the number of icons gets too large to show them all.
>  GTK has widgets designed for precisely this sort of infinite canvas.
>  People with whom you've communicated more recently, or people who are
>  geographically nearer to you, might migrate toward the center.

Yes, this is precisely the type of scalability solution I alluded to
before when I spoke of making the full neighborhood accessible via
search.  Effectively, we'd like to think of the screen area as a
viewport into the broader neighborhood, which happens to contain a
clustering of people and activities most relevant tot he user.

Determining the heuristic for what's relevant needn't by very complex,
thought it could be, and will likely begin with friends, recent
collaborators, your favorite activities, etc.  Naturally, the search
and filter controls will serve as temporary adjustments to the
relevance of the objects on the mesh, and so the view will change in
response to them.  The main reason we didn't jump directly to this
model is because we'd very much like to emphasize the notion of the
window, and of the neighborhood as a larger continuous space, by
"sliding" the XOs, activities, and devices around the screen.  This
would also work well when illustrating XOs moving about the various
activities on screen, but also serves as a way to slide negative
matches radially outward, and positive matches inward, so as to always
keep a relevant set of icons on screen at any time.

- Eben

PS.  I think this brings up the point, by the way, that we have two
different kinds of scalability limits with regard to the view.  The
first is what Pol was initially after, which is the hard limit for
"number of icons shown on a screen of a given size", and the second is
the number of icons (and their presence info) we can realistically
manage technically.  The latter (once we fix the jabber server)
shouldn't pose much of an issue until we start thinking about
inter-school or "world" level communications.  The former, of course,
is still worth investigating, because even with the scalability
solutions listed above for intelligently moving icons on and off
screen, we need to know that limit and filter only the number through
that we can realistically show at once.