soas63xo impressions

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Mikus,

On 16 Sep 2009, at 01:37, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:

> One less nice thing for me is the new toolbar design, as exemplified  
> in Turtle_Art.  It was nice to see the "Title" always in the toolbar  
> - to remind "what am I on this screen for".  Now that the user needs  
> to hover (a particular spot) to see this reminder, Sugar seems less   
> helpful.

There were many of tough calls to make re: the new toolbar design  
work. My early mockups tried to push in 'always show the title'  
direction above, for the reason you mention and for keeping the  
transition simpler:

	http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars

...but the 'always show the title' proposal was overridden by the  
community and for the sake of all the other new toolbar benefits  
(primary tools specifically 'Stop' need to always visible, kids got  
lost in old tab design, old tabs were rather small gui targets for  
young kids to click, tabs were text only, secondary toolbar lock open  
feature now allows visual access to many more tools at once), I needed  
to go with the flow and help with getting them into the release. I  
think they've turned out really great – we (the ActivityTeam et al)  
just need to roll in the new design to as many Activities as we can,  
to keep UI consistency.

FWIW, hiding the title text (plus sharing and keep) under the Activity  
toolbar icon does allow plenty of toolbar space so that even the most  
complicated current activities (Write) also have space to put commonly  
used functions in the primary toolbar. Putting the user coloured  
activity icon in as the first icon is also a nice design win regarding  
identifying the activity you're looking at (and whose it is). So, if  
most folks were still not often titling their activities, seeing the  
text "Write Activity" vs. seeing the Write Activity icon, in user  
colours, is actually providing slightly more information than in the  
common case before ;-b

Thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
--Gary