[sugar] Home Design: Free Layout View

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:08:29PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
> [new home view]

Eben, I have great respect for you and the people involved.  My gut
reaction to the new design, however, was just: it's not beautiful.

I'd like to repeat clearly:

This design is not beautiful.

The ring[1] was beautiful, and the redesigned activity circle/ring[2]
too, but this design is not beautiful.  It lacks a sense of "macro" /
unifying design/layout that the previous two had, and it looks like a
mess :(.

> [the Home view presentation was not a Good Thing; the] main issue of
> concern was one of scalability . . .

What what?? Creation is (journal-wise) nouns; the ring / activities
view is (was) verbs.  I've not idea about design metaphor and the
application thereof, but this seems a large change (not necessarily
bad) for a silly reason: scalability.  Silly I say, because: this
design is no useful way more scalable.  A ring of 50 icons is a better
organization than a free-form desktop of 50 icons.  Sure, they can be
dragged around to make sense of them, but...inherently more scalable
(or more beautiful than your last designs) it is not.

> After experimenting with a number of layouts, it became clear that a
> more traditional freeform view maximizes potential use of the
> available space . . .

Why is space maximization the most important goal?  Clearly a
free-form view is *not* going to result in the maximal packing, but a
somewhat-overlapping grid/hexagonal view.  I find this whole
scalability argument not compelling.

> . . . retains the XO at the center (which is core to
> the zoom metaphor and reflects the philosophy of child ownership of
> laptops) . . .

Sure!

> . . . and also provides, via drag'n'drop, the ability for kids to
> further personalize their Home by arranging and categorizing
> activities as they see fit.

Personalization is good.

> While we contend that the notion of
> favorites is still a powerful organizational tool, and therefore
> propose to keep it in the new designs, this free view scales well
> enough to prevent the need for using them if one doesn't wish to.
> 
> Please observe the new design mockups on the wiki at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Activity_Management for further
> details.  As code freeze is rapidly approaching and these changes are
> slated for the August release aside the rest of the redesign, your
> feedback is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Feedback/summary of the above: keep the last design with its favorite
activity ring, but perhaps stick the shaded ring of the design prior
to *that* behind the favorite-ed activities, perhaps.  But there are
probably a lot of designs more beautiful that this new proposal, so
don't use this new proposal (subject to the "PS" section caveats
below).

> - Eben

Martin

> PS. While considering the implementation details of the new Home
> design, an interesting extension of this idea was proposed: a
> modular layout system. It would take as input the coordinates of the
> dropped icon (and those of all others on screen as well), and output
> coordinates for where the icons should actually be drawn.  (We could
> also include metadata such as name, tags, etc. to allow sorting,
> grouping and such.)

> The simplest layout is the identity function, naturally.  A slightly
> more interesting layout would be the identity function, with some
> extra jiggle logic to prevent overlapping icons.  Another possibility,
> of course, is to compute the angle between the center of the screen
> and the coordinate of the dropped icon, compute a radius r based on
> the total number of icons, and then draw all of the dropped icons in a
> ring of radius r with the newly dropped one at the appropriate
> position in the ring.

Wait, I've changed my mind - *this* is the way to go.  Forget all that
 stuff I said above ;).

>  One can imagine many more, and more importantly, the possibility
> for an extensible system which allows kids to create their own
> custom layouts.

This would be *super* cool.  It's quite high up the gradient of
customizability, but could be a useful amount/degree below the
difficulty of having kids implement their own gtk theme.
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