Need separate indication of stolen laptop during activation.

[wmb@…]

We need: a) A pretty firmware splash screen with no text messages b) A startup sound c) The splash screen needs to show the serial number somewhere unobtrusive d) The OS startup needs to leave the pretty screen intact until it is ready with another pretty screen e) The splash screen could animate some icons to show progress

[marco]

I think Eben has a design for the splash screen. I thought it was somewhere in trac but I cannot find it anymore. Eben?

[Eben]

The ideal startup and shutdown behavior is spec'd in #692.

The visual design elements including a .png image for the splash screen are found in #534.

[follower]

Regarding: b) A startup sound

It really struck me the first time I powered up my first XO B2 how *quiet* it was. Being used to OS X (start-up sound at power-on) and Windows (beeps at PC power on and sound at Windows start) the silence was particularly noticable.

It's possibly worth considering a "startup sound" can indicate a number of things depending on the stage at which it plays:

1) Successful power-on

2) Successful system-test

3) The machine is now ready to be used

Looking at various kids toy "laptops" they (at least the two samples I just looked at) often start with a sound as soon as they turn on--in this case with variations on "Hello" and a musical tune. As was remarked on IRC the other day, using anything with speech in it creates major internationalisation issues so is probably not a candidate for inclusion.

The key theme of the two toy laptops I looked at was the startup sound was uplifting and welcoming.

While playing with TamTam it struck me that a globally relevant and welcoming sound could be:

• the sound of a child (or children) laughing.

Can you imagine a child turning on their XO-1 for the first time and hearing it giggle? Who do you think might giggle next? I think that's a pretty good introduction.

There are some other aspects that probably need to be considered:

• A child's laugh or giggle also helps brand the laptops as "not for adults"--it would be "unprofessional" after all.

• What would the sound of a classroom of laptop's sound like? Possibly not what a teacher wants to hear every morning!

• But, if much use is going to be made of system suspension to enable the mesh network and so forth, then system startup should be relatively rare making the previous issue less significant.

[gnu]

I too love the silence of the machine. Please, no startup sound. It should be as quiet as a paper and pencil.

[AlbertCahalan]

Replying to gnu:

I too love the silence of the machine. Please, no startup sound. It should be as quiet as a paper and pencil.

Definitely. Imagine a classroom with 50 of these. During the lesson, kids will sometimes need to restart. (Bugs happen. Batteries die. Power cords get tripped over.) With a large classroom, the interruptions will be pretty much continuous. In some cultures the noise may also be embarrasing for the student involved, who may decide to just do without the laptop running rather than interrupt the class.

[wmb@…]

Guys, I filed this bug as a reminder that the work needs to be done, not as a forum for suggestions. The ultimate decision about the actual look and feel is made at the highest level of the organization by a person who doesn't subscribe to trac, so it does no good to discuss it here.

The actual sounds are being developed by some professional music people, including one musician who is so famous that he only has one name.

For what it's worth, I like silence too, but it is not my decision.

So please, just let this trac ticket lie fallow. It's a TODO list entry.

[wmb@…]

Progress: a) updated boot progress icons to nice new ones provided by Eben. b) Suppressed startup text from firmware in the fast-boot case.

Still to do: a) New splash screen that matches the XO in center theme. b) Fix the OS to play nice with the quiet boot game.

[wmb@…]

svn 419 has a feature to freeze the screen via the DCON upon entry to the kernel in fast-boot mode. That, in conjunction with a kernel patch to leave the DCON state intact when the olpc-dcon driver is probed, is a start.

[cscott]

We need a design for the activation screens as well. Ivan suggests that we should show an icon with an overlay for the various methods of activation attempted: usb, sd, network. When (say) usb is attempted, we could display the USB icon. If no activation leases are found, superimpose (say) an X on the icon. If activation leases are found on the device but none for the current laptop, then a sad face? Finally, if an activation lease is successfully found, a check mark?

I would guess that we'd use the same splash screen in #534, but we need to distinguish between the USB, etc, icons displayed during boot and those indicating activation status.

Finally, we need to display some indication that activation has failed. The icons with statuses superimposed described above are a good start, but we probably need some other definite indication that all activation attempts failed. We should probably also display the machine's serial number at this point, to help troubleshoot the activation problems.

[Eben]

I've attached 2 files which illustrate the design for the activation process. The outlined white XO is that which appears in the intro screen. When a lease is successfully found, this will transition smoothly to the pulsing XO as the Home screen loads.

When activation begins, the various devices (nand, sd, usb, net) appear one by one as they are searched for a valid lease. If the device isn't found at all, it's icon never appears. If the device is found, it pulses (or flashes) between the white outline and a bright colored fill while it's searched for a lease. If a valid lease isn't found, it returns to a white outline, and the next device is checked. If at any point in time a lease file is located but there is no lease for this laptop in it, the small lock badge will appear on that device. Finally, when all possible devices fail, the white XO will itself receive a locked badge, and the serial number will appear just below it for troubleshooting.

We may also want to place "shutdown" and "restart" buttons in the lower right of the screen so that a hard shutdown isn't required.

[cscott]

Eben, can you attach transparent or grey-background versions of the boot icons (nand, sd, usb, net)? The versions attached to #1222 have white backgrounds. I guess I need both the 'inactive' and 'active' state versions of the icons.

Reassign back to me when you've uploaded the icons.

[cscott]

Discussed with eben:

a) possibly flashing the three elements of the wireless icon individually, from top to bottom, to indicate wireless probing on channel 1, 6, then 11. b) separate indication for 'stolen laptop', as opposed to 'activation not found'

It may be that people are confused by the current 'activation not found' state and think that their laptop is just hung.

[cscott]

Repurposing and retitling.

I've implemented the activation part of the GUI, and #1543 is the meta bug for the rest of the boot process. I don't yet have an icon (different from the "locked" icon) to indicate that the laptop has been reported stolen, as opposed to a simple activation failure.

Reassigning to Eben for the icon; reassign to cscott once the icon is attached.

[Eben]

I can't really think of a good icon that would convey that meaning well. The best thing I can think of is to use the same lock icon but to color it bright red instead of black, but people may be colorblind.

Perhaps in conjunction with a red icon, we simply want to state in writing that the laptop is stolen. We need to keep the serial number, of course, so that it can be identified if returned to rightful owner, but we could add a short string (or even just the word "stolen") to emphasize the point.

Scott, what do you think? Could we add that message just beneath (or instead of) the activation status icons?

[cscott]

I'd prefer to avoid using text of any kind, since the activation code happens very early and the gui is very simple. I don't want to deal with localization at this point.

Perhaps we could use "jail bars" as a graphical element? That should be fairly universal. Or else some sort of iconography which indicates "theft" -- a hand taking something?

We don't really need a completely universal symbol: as long as it is something distinctive, support personel will be able to distinguish between the two cases of "activation failure".

[Eben]

Fair enough. How about going in the other direction then? The lock pretty clearly illustrates the idea of being purposefully locked out, which seems suitable for the stolen laptop circumstance. Why don't we use a less severe icon for situations when activation is uncertain. A large ? is mostly universal and still iconic, and better indicates that something might be missing or malfunctioning, rather than explicitly locked.

If this sounds reasonable I'll attach an icon for you.

[cscott]

Sounds reasonable to me. Since just you, me, and Bradley are on this bug, would you mind throwing it past a few other minds (maybe just yell out something in 1cc and see who says what)? I'll admit that I don't really know anything about UI, so the fact that your idea seems reasonable to me probably doesn't really count for much. ;-)

But changing the icon is pretty low-effort, so feel free to attach and icon and I'll put it into a build (the lock won't actually show up until after I finish some other bits of infrastructure that will let the laptop actually discover that is is stolen, but a decent number of people will probably see the question mark at some point or other).

--scott

[Eben]

Walter and Ivan, take a look at my comment (2 prior to this one) and see if the thought makes sense.

[Eben]

Scott, I can't seem to locate the previous lock badge I gave you for some reason, to see the format I supplied it in. The one I've attached now is the current size of the other badges in the UI (25px), and would therefore need to be scaled up. On the other hand, Marco might have me convert everything to a single standard size (55px) and then scaling would go from there...

At any rate, let me know what else you need for now, and we can clear that up later.

[cscott]

It occurs to me that a question mark is not really universal; only countries with a roman character set are likely to understand this badge.

I cropped the original badge from locked.png above; it is 28x28 (including the white border).

[Eben]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Other_languages

It's true it's not totally universal, but it's likely that not even every icon will be universally understood. The question mark, of the typographic symbols out there, is actually understood in fairly large number of languages, albeit upside-down, inside-out, and backwards in some of them. It's even an used with similar connotations in a number of programming languages, and in other computer related contexts ( query strings in URLs, ternary conditional operators, etc.)

In the general case we could also support localization of this character, but of course you've mentioned that it's not worth it at this stage of boot, so if the "?" isn't universal enough we may need a better alternative, though I'm not sure what that could be. This is still the best idea I can come up with at this point.

[AlbertCahalan]

Rather than worrying about locale, you could do as Apple does for a crash: show the message in several popular languages.

You can use an image, eliminating the need for Pango in the firmware.

I suggest picking languages that teachers might know, perhaps as a second language. Common second languages: English, Spanish, Arabic. Maybe include French too.

[kimquirk]

Assigning back to trial-3 -- sounds like you're almost there... is there something big still left to do in this bug?

[cscott]

'Stolen' icon fixed in olpcrd 0.27. Closing bug.