[sugar] Copy/Paste icon colour (Re: A Sugar TODO List, of Sorts)

[Eben Eliason]

This is absolutely not intended to mitigate the need for previews at
all...that is, in fact the next thing I might look into in my
part-time hacking of sugar, since it's a blatant omission and dearly
needed.

However, I think that the coloring will neatly compliment the
previews.  The core concept to consider is that identity is, at least
loosely, tied to colors in Sugar.  If Alice sends Bob a story she
wrote, it will appear in Alice's colors in Bob's Journal.  This
metaphor is also used in general for shared activities.  The real
point is that this identity mechanism needs to be carried through the
UI as much as possible.  In Record, I would expect that Alice's
pink/purple photo would appear in her colors if I chose to save it
directly to my Journal.  Likewise, if I were to drag Alice's
pink/purple photo to the clipboard, I would expect the resulting
clipping to appear in her colors.  My hope is to extend this, to the
extent possible, to the copy/paste paradigm so that these identities
get passed around the interface, onto the clipboard, and into the
Journal.

While colors obviously don't serve as a unique identifier for a
person, nor form a "true" identity, they do serve to highlight the
collaborative aspect of the UI and make the entire interface much more
engaging.  I want to do everything we can to make that evident.  In
the worst case, I think we can always have clippings take the colors
of the activity they came from, which actually makes some sense
anyway.  Eg. If I tear a small corner of blue paper, the shred I tore
off remains blue.  Only if activities choose, and it's convenient
(Record is an example where not much extra work would need to be done
to make this happen), do I expect we might have a smarter way to
assign the colors based on the selection.

- Eben


On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 7:36 PM, Joshua N Pritikin <jpritikin at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 12:56:54PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
>  > On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>  > > On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:00, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>  > >  >>  • Color copy/paste buttons in activities
>  > >  > Which colors should take? Just the local colors?
>  > >
>  > >  I've always been unclear about the purpose of this, and have not seen
>  > >  an explanation – always thought the coloured icon looked out of place
>  > >  in the toolbar. Anyone know the reason/metaphor that makes colouring
>  > >  it so important?
>  >
>  > When a clipping is made, it appears in the Frame as an icon, rendered
>  > in a specific XO color pair.  Having clippings in various colors can
>  > help to make the clipboard a bit more engaging, and aid in identifying
>  > the correct one in the absence of (much needed) previews.
>
>  Eben, usually your ideas make sense to me. Maybe I am missing something,
>  but I don't understand your idea.
>
>  What the clipboard needs is previews. Does coloring a clipping with the
>  source XS color pair add anything if there is already a preview?
>