Talk:Development Team/0.84/Shell improvements

Control panel enhancements

See my ticket #7773 about allowing arbitrary color selection for the user stroke and fill colors. Stepping through the random selector, only to decide that the best one you've seen was five back can be frustrating for the user. This also would allow a teacher to tell the kids to defer the choice, or to resolve conflicting or inappropriate choices.

Date and time should at least display the date and time, not just select the time zone. Rmyers 21:45, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Home view

Another inconsistency. In the Home view "Favorites", there is the XO man, and you can get to the control panel, shutdown, etc.. In the "List View", you can't. As these are two views of what is supposed to be the same location, the same options should be available. Rmyers 18:37, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

General note

When Apple started with the Macintosh they had a particular class of restricted applications - Apple menu items. These imposed a modality on the use of the system. Apple gradually moved away from this to a model where all apps, even if they lived on the Apple menu space, played by the same rules, and even the Finder is just another application.

I generally like the .82 redesign, but I find some of the modality frustrating. Examples:

Alt-tab tabs away from the Control panel or Activity selection pane, but not back to it.
The control panel is horribly modal and not consistently so. Touch the neighborhood or group button and you can see the panes in the background but not interact. Touch the home view button and nothing happens. Touch the activity button and you go to an open activity.

My feeling is 'parts is parts'. The control panel and activity selector are just activities and should be equivalent to other activities. Home should open and show the activity picker, the xo figure can have a shortcut to the control panel, but otherwise they are nothing special. I know that this supposed to make it easy for kids.But consistency is easier to learn. Rmyers 21:45, 7 September 2008 (UTC)