Home list view: remove date column, enable alphabetical sort, label versions "Version x"

[FGrose]

Observed in Soas1-20090319.

In list view I see a favorite star, activity icon, activity name, version number, and a date--but no explanation for number or date.

I was most perplexed by the number which I figured out was the version by from seeing those in the mailings. This may be mysterious for others wondering are there x versions or x instances or x what?

Perhaps, suffix the version # to the activity name (with some extra space, which doesn't show in the Trac wiki, so I've added some periods as place holders, which might work as well to separate and bind) instead of giving it its own column (which implied a count, to me). So it would be bound more closely with the name and not be in a separate column, like:

Story Builder . . . 13
Chat . . . 64
Terminal . . . 23
.
.
.

I take it that the date is the date of the image build and not of the activity version since they are all nearly the same. This doesn't really offer much useful information. Activity version date would be, perhaps, a useful reference.

Thanks for considering!

[eben]

Yes, our initial designs contained a column view sort bar (such as can be seen in the Journal mockups here:  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DesignTeam/Designs/Journal#03), but this control doesn't exist. The columns, of course, would indicate the meaning of the fields, such as version and installation date.

The reason installation date is included (admittedly not useful for activities that are installed with the base, since they share the same date) is so that this view can be arranged temporally much like the Journal as additional activities are added over time.

Perhaps we should consider re-factoring the list views to use a standard GTK column view of some kind, with rows which contain hippo canvases, instead of using a canvas for the whole view. Tomeu? Marco?

[FGrose]

Consensus from  http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090419_0911.html was

[10:26:16] <cms> #3: Home list view: remove the date column and enable alphabetical sort. Label versions "Version x"

[FGrose]

Consider avoiding the text, 'Version', for the following reasons:

• minimize text
  • international
  • graphical over lexical presentation
  • simpler
  • higher content/ink ratio
  • more beautiful without redundant words
• Binding version # to name makes a unique name for the Activity instance object
  • useful for handling multiple versions of object class
  • version# is a defining attribute of the object instance
  • version# is not something one would sort on outside of the name group