[sugar] An experience report with joyride-1916

[Michael Stone]

Dear sugar@,

I played with some of your recent work in joyride-1916 for a few hours
yesterday and I took notes on things which surprised or bothered me.
Here they are, in no particular order:

 * I had a Browse-87 in /home/olpc/Activities and Browse-86 in
   /usr/share/activities. (I installed Browse-87 by manually unzipping
   it, then restarting Sugar). I starred Browse-87 and attempted to
   launch it. Browse-86 was launched.

 * It takes a _very_ long time to populate the list view. Feedback
   is needed. (In particular, why can't we draw items incrementally as
   we discover them?) [This confused Carla when I showed her the new
   UI.]

 * It's hard to figure out that you need to visit the list view in order
   to populate the ring view. I have a couple of suggestions on how to
   deal with this.

      a) If no activities have been starred, display a graphic
      indicating that starring activities will put them in the ring and
      give a big, prominent button that takes you to the list view.

      b) If no activities have been starred, include an icon for a
      tutorial activity which, among other things, teaches you how to
      star more activities.

      c) Pressing the "home" zoom key (i.e. the circle with a single
      dot) multiple times should cycle through the ring and list views.
      (And maybe the Journal as well? The Journal is much more
      shell-like than activity like at this point.)

 * Activity icons stop pulsing _long_ before a window is mapped onto the
   screen. This is a big problem. Eben has proposed one method for
   solving it; however, there's not nearly enough visual feedback
   connecting the pulsing icon in the corner with the icon I've clicked.
   I really think that visually representing the queue of activities
   being launched and visually moving the icon of the activity being
   launched into that queue would be a good idea independent of big
   pulsing activity splash screens.

 * Stopping one activity from the home view should not cause another
   activity window to be foregrounded.

 * We should use the "stop-sign" icon for both stopping activities and
   for disconnecting from the mesh. [Carla's suggestion]

 * On my XO, presence became very unhappy as a result of #6586. Dear
   kernel/firmware people: this badly needs to be fixed.

Thanks,

Michael