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evil-mad / robopaint

The software for your friendly painting robot kit!
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Print-context UI: de-emphasize status bar #49

Closed oskay closed 11 years ago

oskay commented 11 years ago

We should de-emphasize, and otherwise make the "status bar" (which displays the last command, time, and status) less intimidating. Users do not need log-level detail.

A few ways to do help:

  1. Remove the time stamp.
  2. Stop using code-style (e.g., courier) font
  3. Move it out of the most conspicuous location; currently it's in the "HEADLINE" location on a newspaper.
  4. Go to a single STOP button. We do not need both pause and cancel buttons. Some kind of resume capability might be helpful.

Suggested solution:

  1. Add a new sub-box below "Machine" on the right-hand column, "Status," with a single multifunction button that can either be "STOP" or "resume" (when available)
  2. Keep description of current activity BRIEF.
  3. Update status when a given action is in progress or finishes. "Painting: Complete!" "Parked successfully." "Preparing to paint" etc.

screen shot 2013-07-25 at 11 39 28 am screen shot 2013-07-25 at 11 42 13 am

techninja commented 11 years ago

Sounds like a leaps and bounds improvement on the UI!

One problem: This makes the right "control panel" quite a bit taller than before. Perhaps it should simply "zoom" to fit as the other elements like the paint do?

techninja commented 11 years ago

Oh and.. should the top logo say "Robopaint"? I don't think I got that logo.

oskay commented 11 years ago

Logos on their way via e-mail.

oskay commented 11 years ago

No idea if there's room; there was in the version that I was testing... but I apparently need to download the latest version.

oskay commented 11 years ago

I think that there is room for this.

We need to fit the entire window, including title bar of the window, into about 600 px vertical. If the column is moved upwards a little bit (see issue #53 ), and we fine-tune the appearance of some of the RHS column elements, this shouldn't be an issue.

oskay commented 11 years ago

Very much improved as of last commit!

techninja commented 11 years ago

Glad you like it. Spent an extra hour polishing up a few things I'd left for "later". Also I'm thinking the rearrangement was definitely worth a little extra effort. Notice this was the first tagged release, that's a big milestone.

There's still lots of known bugs, not to mention the status bar fixes, but incremental improvements will totally get us there.

oskay commented 11 years ago

New paper style is a nice touch. :)

We've got quite a bit of fine-tuning to do, but it does seem to be extremely promising that it really can get to "elegant" at some point.

techninja commented 11 years ago

Found a few minutes on lunch break... Should pressing "stop" park the bot? Or simply stop movement and lift the brush (but stay put)?

oskay commented 11 years ago

Nice to have you back, if only for a few minutes. ;)

I'd say that STOP should only stop movement and raise the brush. If the robot is busy crashing into the left side, then STOP should offer some relief.

Once STOP is pressed, then the button should change to "RESUME" -- we've got separate controls to raise the brush and turn off motors... we may need to expose (make visible) the PARK (i.e., return to start corner) button at that point as well.

techninja commented 11 years ago

Aha! Good point. Will do.

As an aside, Sylvia and I worked out a "simple" and "advanced" 2 tabbed interface to hide most of the less used features in the WCB control side bar. This would both deal with current height issues, and have less clutter and more focus for particular kids and power-users alike. For example, the entire set of manual buttons would live there.

techninja commented 11 years ago

A few questions that might need to be answered for the right panel:

If our recommendations include bot movement, they probably need to have clearly labeled buttons just in case people didn't read the documentation, less so on the "advanced" side.

I mean to ask, what does "park" mean to the user? Even if they understand the action, the question becomes why would they do it? Perhaps in the welcome documentation we tell a story about the brush carriage and how it likes to be "home" :)

oskay commented 11 years ago

How should we recommend users vertically position their brush/pen?

With the brush over the water dish, and in the down position, make the brush barely touch the bottom of the water dish.

How should we recommend users change out water/paint?

Take off the superstructure of the WCB.

How should we recommend users deal with inevitable skips/crashes/derailment?

It will almost never do any of those things if it's set up correctly. That said, hit the STOP button.