Andy's comments and positioning...

[Marty Billingsley]

Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> asks
>Marty Billingsley wrote:
>
>> That said, the RR user interface isn't as friendly toward
>> students as it could be, but we're coping. :-)
>
>If you could make three changes to the Rev UI what would they be?

Have to think about this for a while.  I'm in the middle of the
second go-around of a quarter-long course that was taught in
HyperCard until this year (to eighth graders), and am just getting
a handle on what the kids find to be difficult.

1: more for my convenience than the students', but I'd love to
have the Home stack back.  I used to be able to include a whole
library of sounds for the students to use without having to
explicitly import them.  Now I have to give the students a CD of
sound effects and have them import the sounds into their projects
before they can use them.  Huge time-waster.

Another example of the added difficulty: we do a project that
incorporates music (we create an electronic keyboard) using Shakobox.
The students have to explicitly start the stack using Shakobox and
also include an applescript which quits an external application when
they close the stack.  I'd like to hide this detail from my students;
right now I put a stack in a central location that they can copy
from; the stack has the scripts necessary to make Shakobox work, but
nothing else.  Having the Home stack back would be great; is there
some way to mimic that in Rev?

2: minor annoyances could be fixed, such as the properties
inspector sometimes not inspecting the object that is currently
selected.  I'm thinking it's supposed to switch when when you
switch selections, but it only happens about half the time.
Since students aren't very alert to this they end up changing
properties of the wrong object some of the time.

The painting tools aren't very robust; they often don't work
when another object, like a button, is present on the card.
I like to encourage the students to create their own art work
instead of just using images off the web, so this is off-putting.

3: the properties inspector has many more options than my students
use.  They find it hard to remember where things are, because (to
them) the placement isn't always logical.  Why, for example, can't
you choose the text color in the text formatting tab?  I'd like
some way to simplify the inspector so that things my students are
likely to need will be on the main tab (basic properties) and
everything else is someplace else.  This, of course, would have
to be configurable by each user, much the way toolbars are in
many apps.

This was a good question!  Made me think....and realize that the
UI is actually pretty robust, if the above is all I could come
up with.....

Oh, and help could be easier.  Better keyword search and/or index
to the transcript language dictionary.  Right now you have to
know the name of the thing you want to find out about.  We need
a transcript dictionary of synonyms. :-)

  - marty

--
Marty Billingsley (marty at ucls.uchicago.edu)
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools

    "We are our choices...."
                   - Sartre