share-like-connect in 4.10

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, October 4, 2012 17:11:16 Marco Martin wrote:
> > con: more clicks needed
> 
> not that if all the actions are all in a single list

yes, that's possible. i think it rather destroys the idea of "share, like, 
connect". if we put it all in one menu, there's really no point in 
distinguishing at all between the 3 actions for the user's POV.

the three concept sin SLC is predicated on the idea that people will think "i 
want to share this with other people" or "i would like to connect this to 
another thing" or "i would like to mark this as something i like" as an easy 
path to taking (and finding) a specific action. it's mental a distinction 
between "me", "them" and "it".

if it is just as effective to have a "do stuff to that thing you're looking at" 
interface, then putting it in one list doesn't matter (ignoring scalability 
issues of lists ... but let's ignore that for the moment).

what would such a list look like?

Share
-------
Target A
Target B

Like
-----
Action C
Action D

Connect
-----------
Target E
Target F

or

Share with Target A
Share with Target B
Like Action C
Like Action D
Connect to Target E
Connect to Target F

(if there's ever a share target that is also a connect target, things get 
messier, but let's ignore that possibility too for now)

to me, this suffers from the same annoyances as something like kickoff or the 
old kmenu: one link that opens up to show a bunch of options.

*thinks*

another possibility if space saving is really that much a of a concern is to 
then do like kickoff and show a set of tabs in a single window shown when the 
icon is clicked.

but this seems very premature. can we try it with all 3 icons on a panel and 
see how it works in practice? 

> > con: can't see immediately see whether there are share, like or connect
> > actions available  (it's common that only 1 or 2 are active for a given
> > URI) unless we increase the information in the icon
> 
> this is probably the real issue (ie what icon to put in this case to give
> the right message?)

yes, it demonstrates the conceptual challenge.

> yeah, the concern was just that it wouldn't have any action for many
> applications in the beginning, given that just a subset will report the
> resource in day 0, so it may be seen as a bunch of always disabled icons...

so let's get applications patched. it's a "chicken and egg" problem, and we 
just need to do both. support in file manager, web browser and common viewers 
would be plenty though.

> what about using the activity button applet itself?
> in this case the slc buttons will appear only when actually supported.

because moving UI around makes it harder to use. one needs to look (possibly 
for nothing!) in different locations for the same action.

if the problem is that not enough applications will have ResourceInstance 
support, then when enough do would we switch it back? is this a solution for a 
short term problem? will it even be a problem, or will we have enough 
applications working by 4.10?

> the con there would be making in this case the pager position to dance

the pager and everything else :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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