Changes

Zooming in from the Home view, a child finds the Activity view. This view contains the activities where all of the actual creation, exploration, and collaboration takes place.  This is where you, the developer, come into play, providing new and engaging tools, extending the functionality and encouraging new types of creative exploration.

Zooming in from the Home view, a child finds the Activity view. This view contains the activities where all of the actual creation, exploration, and collaboration takes place.  This is where you, the developer, come into play, providing new and engaging tools, extending the functionality and encouraging new types of creative exploration.

Though multitasking has become somewhat of a standard in today's desktop computing world, we've chosen to break away from this model, instead adopting a fullscreen activity view that focuses the children's energies on one specific task at a time. Although one may have several activities open in the activity ring at any given moment, only one can be denoted as the active activity (similar to focus in a window system). Several factors contributed to this decision: first, although the laptops have an extremely high-resolution display—200dpi—the actual viewing area remains quite small—a modest 7.5-inch diagonal—leaving little room for multiple activities on the screen; and, as noted, it naturally focuses efforts on a specific task. The [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The Frame|Frame]] detailed below serves as the interstitial tissue between activities. As a visual extention of the [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The Journal|Journal]], it enables objects to move between activities.

Though multitasking has become somewhat of a standard in today's desktop computing world, we've chosen to break away from this model, instead adopting a fullscreen activity view that focuses the children's energies on one specific task at a time. Although one may have several activities open in the activity ring at any given moment, only one can be denoted as the active activity (similar to focus in a window system). Several factors contributed to this decision: first, although the laptops have an extremely high-resolution display—200dpi—the actual viewing area remains quite small—a modest 7.5-inch diagonal—leaving little room for multiple activities on the screen; second, as noted, it naturally focuses efforts on a specific task. The [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The Frame|Frame]] detailed below serves as the interstitial tissue between activities. As a visual extention of the [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The Journal|Journal]], it enables objects to move between activities.

For extensive detail on the various aspects of the activity interface and their design guidelines, see the [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/Activities|Activities]] section.

For extensive detail on the various aspects of the activity interface and their design guidelines, see the [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/Activities|Activities]] section.