zui ideas

[Chani]

on sunday me, notmart and ruphy came up with some crazy ideas for the ZUI.
here are the notes... better late than never ;)

zoom 2 (fully zoomed out):

-the containment is too small to realyl interact with, so put the toolbox over 
top.
problem: on small devices the toolbox could be bigger than the containment.

-if you have one screen there's always space for 4x4 containments, so when 
containment-saving is implemented we could have 2 columns of active ones and 2 
columns of saved ones. you could drag&drop between the areas to load and save 
them (although we could have load/save buttons too perhaps).
for multiple screens, we get around the problem of different-sized screens by 
giving each screen its own part of the canvas for its own containments. we 
might need to record the last screen they were on, for this. when a screen is 
unplugged, all its containments would be saved out, and show up in the saved-
containment list on either the first screen or all screens. when it's plugged 
in again they'd all jump back where they were automagically. to move a 
containment from one screen to another, just drag it there.

problems:
-discoverability. some people try to drag things, some don't.
-accessibility. you can't drag with the keyboard.

zoom level 1:
-can we overlay the cashew bar on containments instead of putting it below?
also... bigger buttons are easier to click, but get in the way of applet 
dragging. so should we make them bigger or not?

zoom 1/2:
-we should have a big + button where the next new ctmt would go. I've wanted 
that since the start but never got around to it.
-corona toolbox: try using a hbox and see if it looks better.
-making the remove action work for the current activity should be easy now, 
but we haven't got around to it

zoom 0 (fully zoomed in):
-the cashew can be moved around the edge of the screen; should we make it 
possible to detach it?
but you'd have to rewrite the toolbox first because the code is scaaary

...the only thing we're missing here is someone to actually implement all this 
;)

--------------

today we talked to sebas and he had some other zui ideas. I don't seem to have 
proper notes on those. it was something to do with dynamically zooming out as 
much as needed to show all the containments. also, positioning htem nicely so 
that you didn't have to pan slightly to see the edges of them (also, having 
hte topleft one pinned to the topleft corner of the screen sucks)

oh, and either painting a screenshot of the active containment, or just its 
wallpaper, instead of the checkerboard. we want this to be shiny as well as 
useful. :)

sebas, maybe you can explain your ideas a bit more clearly than I can. :)

-- 
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