[sugar] Home Design: Free Layout View

[Mikus Grinbergs]

I liked the visual simplicity of the "launch circle" for Activities.
I dislike having a "jungle" of Activities show up in the Home view.

> The main issue of concern was one of scalability; The circular
> arrangement suggested an inherent finite quality which runs counter to
> our goals of allowing children to create and explore as much as possible

I am not a kid.  But I think a launch concept I've been using for 
more than 10 years on my desktop system could be incorporated into 
the Home-view page:

On my display I have a window which consists of a space for icons, 
with a line of "tabs" underneath it.  As each "tab" is clicked, it 
shows in the upper space the icons assigned to that tab.  I launch 
applications by clicking on one of the icons.  [Thus launching 
consists of a sequence (a 'hierarchy'):  (1) selecting a "tab", (2) 
selecting an "icon" brought up by that tab.]

This facility is very compact yet scalable - "vertical" expansion 
allows for multiple lines of "tabs" to use the same upper space for 
their icons, while "horizontal" expansion allows the lines of tabs 
themselves (and/or the upper space for icons) to be scrolled.

--------

What could be done on the Home-view page (once the existing "ring" 
gets too crowded) is to *not* show some icons until an "enabling 
object" is clicked.  By "expanding" only one "enabling object" at a 
time, the available space on the Home-view page gets multi-used -- 
providing lots of scalability.  Since a "ring display of objects" 
looks good, clicking on an "enabling object" put into an inner ring 
could bring up an adjacent "outer ring segment" showing more icons.

[In what I am using on my desktop, the "enabling object" capability 
is provided by the "tab".  In the proposal I made on the wiki Design 
page, that capability I had called the "palette root".]


mikus

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