Sugar design review 3

Activities

• Each activity will be a fullscreen window. This is important given the limited size of the display.
• Each activity will have a close button in the top-right corner, transparent to not cover the eventual content.
• The framework will not provide docks, like a default toolbar bar or a menubar. Activities author will decide to use toolbox, toolbars or whatever is more appropriate. Though we will probably provide some guidelines.
• Activities are shared by default. When opening a new activity the presence window will be showed for a few seconds, and a "shared" checkbox (or similar) will be showed to allow the user to keep this activity private.
• When activating an activity the presence window is displayed for a few seconds to show the people that are around and to give user a clue that other people can actully be present on the page.

Web browser activity

Sketch activity

Presence window popping up for a few seconds

Home

• Home is a visual representation of the _active_ activities, both currently followed by the user or just shared on the network around him.
• It will be the start page. It's a good start point because, from the active activity, kids will get an idea of what they can do with the laptop and see that there are other people around them.
• It will also be the place where kids get back when they want to do something different or just get back to an activity they was previously working on.
• It will allow to start new activities. Probably just a new button bringing up a list of possible activities (Web, Sketch, Music composition, for example)
• It will be feature an incremental search entry.
• It will be activated by an home button. In the first revision of the hardare it will be possible to navigate it using arrow keys. For this to be convenient the home and the arrows button should both be located near the keyboard and the mouse pad.
• It will slide in also when hitting with the cursor one of the screen edges (probably)
• Activities will have to be ordered/filtered so that those that the user has currently open, the most active and the most relevant will have higher priority.

The simpler implementation would probably be a grid. Activities that the user has currently open could be graphically differentiated and would have higher priority in the grid order

Diana had more interesting idea. In the center we would display the activities the user is currently following. While the external circle would host activities currently shared on the network. The limited space on the internal circle could be used to limit the number of activities a kid can keep contemporarily open.

People window

• The presence window and the chat window from Sugar review 2 will be merged in an unique slide-in
• It will be activated by a "People" button (one of the function keys at the top of the keyboard)
• It will slide in also when hitting with the cursor one of the screen edges

The people window

My blog

• A special activity always accessible from "Home"
• Organized and navigable by day
• It will keep track of the activities the kid partecipated during the day. That way we have a way to get back to them even when they are not active anymore.
• Part (the explicitly posted diary entries most likely) of it will be visible to the other kids, for example by double clicking on a buddy in presence window.
• It will allow the kids to post diary like entries.

My Blog