[etoys-dev] Re: [Sugar-devel] Etoys: toolbar

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Wednesday 06 January 2010 08:40:28 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> There are no hover-palettes in Etoys. The long-click to reveal "hidden"
>  save and load options predates Sugar. Same for the Supplies flap, which
>  explains its look. The only new thing is the share button's menu, which
>  was made to look similar to the regular Sugar palettes.
> 
> Now that you point it out it does indeed feel inconsistent compared to
>  other activities. A ticket may be in order (though I have no real idea how
>  to solve it).
Icon space along the top is precious and there is no need to waste two slots 
just for projects. A single Gallery icon should be sufficient. It should open 
out to a catalog into which a project label (or its name tile) could be 
dropped or dragged out.

One of the patterns I see frequently with school kids new to Etoys is the 
nesting of new projects. i.e. a new project would be started within the 
currently saved project and so on. They would skip pressing the "previous" 
button to close the current project before starting a new one. Why is a 
project not "closed" when it is "put back" into storage? A mismatch between 
cognitive models used by children and programmers.

Children understand the difference between a thing and its label very well. So 
we could have Labels and LabelMorphs for off-image stuff like projects, sound, 
pictures, video and have them store an URI. The tabs can show default folder, 
clipboard and knownServers and the labels can be created on the fly. When the 
label is dragged into the current world for viewing or editing, the URIs are 
resolved into physical locations and the object is loaded into the image. When 
the label (or a projects name tile) is dropped back into the catalog, updates 
(if any) are flushed to the physical store.

Yoshiki pointed out that generating labels on the fly is slow when a folder 
contains hundreds of objects. We can tackle this using paged views with each 
page containing only ten or so entries.

Subbu