Eduardo,
Thank you for the comments and suggestions!
In various parts of Etoys, there is balloon help, which is really nice, especially the programming tiles. But I think the balloon help for the interface is many times is too verbose.
Ah, yes. I sometimes agree with it. But, can you give us some more your thoughts on *why* verbose balloon help is not preferable?
New Project Button -> balloon text should only say "New Project" instead of "Start a new project"
Save Project icon -> balloon text should say "Save a Project. Hold down button to reveal additional publish options" . Take away the "Click here to", and "Hold down _this_ button". In both cases the kid knows that it is a clickable button (all activities have clickable buttons on top), and which button the balloon text is referring to (the one bellow his cursor). This looks like how people used web links many years ago, "click _this link_ to go to my homepage".
That would be a good observation. Some of the help messages indeed many years old!
Find Project icon -> "Find a Project. Hold down button to reveal additional options".
I would think that these are more or less reasonable suggestions. Once our native speaker colleague gets spare time, this may happen.
Undo icon - When I click it once, it undoes, then I click it again, and it Re-does? There should exist an Redo button next to this one instead.
I'm not sure about this (having an extra button for redo), especially because we don't have multi level redo.
Flags icon -> "Change Language"
Neighbourhood and Close icons -> I thought these where in the top frame. Or will etoys replicate the outside frame?
As of 466, there is no close icon in the "top frame". Share is not in the "top frame".
And the neighbourhood is way verbose. If the look for the badges are that unobvious that their function should be detailed here, then they probably need improvement? But won't they be XO icons with the friends colors. If so, kids by then will now what they mean. And extra help like "drag objects to give to your friend" could be in the badges themselves.
These list shows the neighbors icons in their colors. The ideal situation is that an accompanying document explains what would really happen, and then the verbose explanation becomes really unnecessary.
Display icon -> "Select Display Mode", but not sure.
For the interface, the text doesn't have to explain in detail every button's function, because most of them are not destructive, and so through experimenting kids will work them out.
Or they simply ignore.
I've noticed that when you create a new window, its thumbnail is colored, then when you go inside, the background is gray, and then out and it remains gray.
Having multi-colored backgrounds for new Etoys projects was something that I found nice in the past, and even made the environment fun too look at. It would probably be the same for kids. If the problem is contrast, then couldn't you choose less saturated colors, so they became light green, light blues,etc.?
The first one probably can be and should be fixed (i.e., the newly created project thumbnail bear the background color of the project). In regards to Multi-colored backgrounds... that would certainly make the documentation effort harder. (it would not be a bad idea of course).
The color picker to choose a project's world color is very small and different than all the other windows (the button to "pin" the window is tiny, for example).
Any color picker is really bad. It should be fixed.
I think trash should be present in new Projects.
Can you explain why? I usually delete the trashcan before publish a project.
When you colapse a morph with the circle halo, it stays collapsed on top of the sugar bar, and uses different button icons.
There is an argument for removing the collapse handle altogether. What do you think?
In the script windows, there are two buttons which show some repeated tiles, the chest button and the menu button. The ones they repeat are: Self title, random number title, button down?, button up?, repeat title.
The chest icon doesn't follow the style of the neighbours.
That is exactly correct. The redesign of scriptor is on our list, and making the header line similar to sugar-bar and our supply bin would be a good idea.
Also, in the Object Catalog, in the Scripting category there is repeat, button up? and button down?
Yes. Is that bad?
Finally, It would be really handy if there was a button which sent to the trash all of the method tiles scattered on the "desktop". While I'm doing a project/etoy, it becomes tiresome to have to allways trash them, so I just drop them anywhere out of the way and continue my thing. After a while I have a big mess of tiles on screen. I think kids may also behave like this in the beginning, when they are just messing with and trying new tiles (exploring?). But perhaps the Button tiles and "values" tiles could stay.
I also see many kids delete a tile as soon as they drag out from a scriptor. What do you think if the multi-selection feature is easier to use (such as, just click and drag the background to initiate multiple selections)?
Again, thank you for the comments!
-- Yoshiki