zui ideas

[Chani]

On July 14, 2009 23:00:22 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 10 July 2009, Chani wrote:
> > 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.
>
> how would you tell the difference? (saved ones would be "greyed out" and
> not actually interactive, i suppose?)

possibly... maybe we could have some sort of header, I'm not sure... they 
wouldn't have the same set of actions, and they'd be on the right-hand half of 
the screen.

>
> where would the visualization come from for the saved ones? (snapshot saved
> to an image when saved?)

yes, a thumbnail image

>
> how often would one switch between saved and un-saved?

good question. I might only stash my school activities when I'm out at a 
conference, or I might stash one when I finish my homework for that course and 
open it again in a day or two.

>
> > you could drag&drop between the areas to load
> > and save them (although we could have load/save buttons too perhaps).
>
> buttons on each activity kinds of sucks as it is. adding more buttons..
> mmm...

yeah :/

>
> > we might need to record the last screen they were on, for this. when a
>
> it already is recorded when the screen is removed.

cool

>
> > 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.
>
> disabling and saving out unplugged screen activities is a nice idea.
>
> keeping screen activities completely separate though makes for some
> annoyances like having to decide ahead of time which screen a containment
> should be on, or else be faced with some odd dance like save the
> containment, go to the other screen and select it to be loaded.

no, just drag it over to the screen you want it on.
:/ drag&drop is *that* unintuitive?

>
> the whole save/load thing feels very artificial at that point.
>
> i do like the idea of a "make this activity inactive" area, perhaps by
> simple dragging it there as you note. but i don't think it can or should
> dominate the screen much if at all.
>
> in fact, to me it would make the most sense to just have a strip of
> inactive activites, sort of like the new add widgets interface will be.

hmm, that could work too.

>
> or perhaps just replace zooming with such a listing altogether .. perhaps
> zooming would just put the view into a coverflow-ish mode that lets you
> flick through the various activities. this would also neatly solve the
> "buttons on each activity" problem as one set of controls would be shown
> below and acting on the activity that is currently "front and center".

hmm. interesting.

>
> second zoom out could present a nice grid effect if needed .. this might
> agree nicely with the media center visual goals as well.

wait... so on which zoom level would you get the chance to drag an applet 
between containments?


> painting a screenshot of the active containment just mixes messages: "some
> of these things are zoomed, but others aren't". confusing.

I agree. I think sebas suggested greying them out, but still...

>
> painting the walllpaper of the active containment, or any wallpaper for
> that matter, means having to be able to clearly distinguish between that
> background and the containments themselves. that implies a border/shadow
> painted around containments. that's the technical issue that needs
> addressing, regardless of what zooming techniques are otherwise used.

ahh. um. so draw a border, then? :) didn't you say you had some shadow thingy?

...but once we start drawing around them then we can't perfectly fit them into 
a 2x2 or 4x4 grid, wah. so then maybe one of the other approaches (coverflow, 
dynamic zoom) would look prettier.

-- 
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www.chani3.com
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