ok.. sorry I couldn't answer earlier... first, Thanks Karel for sharing your ideas... and NWM/harry/vivia for this thread.. but I just think it's useless talk... Karel, I understand what you're saying and you might be right about the splash screen not being effective... but how much of our GUI is following HIG? and I don't see how a progress bar, animated logo, debug "loading XXX" lines would change anything... in my experience, when a window loads, you can work with it... and what NWM said is 100% true, the X/Y position is a huge problem... putting those config in another place is just a hack and it would give us extra effort for nothing that is useless.. loading the config first is just plain stupid because the huuuuuge loading part IS the config itself... because as vivia said, we need to determine which config to load, check the ports, timeout, etc.. that's the part that takes most time... so no way to load config first... and as I said, I just can't imagine how it would be an empty amsn window with a 'please wait' in it.. doesn't fit in my head.. and if we want to keep the x/y/width/height configuration of the user (which are important) we can't do it this way.. is it easier for the usr to look at the amsn window, wait until it loads, mouse ready for clicking on connect, and it finished loading and bam all of a sudden the window is placed somewhere else with a different size.. the user will get lost...! Also.. to be able to load the menus, etc.. we'll probably need gui.tcl and maybe some other stuff, since gui.tcl depends on some other things (like status log, plugins (since a plugin can add something to the gui which depends on the plugin log, etc..) right now, the list of sourced files in the amsn file has a very specific order.. you switch that order, everything breaks.. so it might be too late that we show this 'amsn splash'... unless we refactor the whole bootstrap process... in my opinion.. a splash screen might not be the best solution, as Karel suggested... but it's not the worse either.. I prefer to have a splash than just nothing.. also, an alternate solution would require a massive amount of work, and we don't have anyone to work on that, which means, if we decide "ok, forget the splash let's do it like Karel said" then we'll end up in two years with someone posting on the forums "why isn't there a splash screen" then this discussion will begin AGAIN (YES, this is the second time I think that we got so close to having a splash screen and for whatever reason we didn't do anything...) Also, people are USED TO splash screens, so even if it's not the best, they won't be bothered that much since they know what a splash screen is and they are used to it.. so IMHO, we go with the splash screen solution as it is the one that needs the least time and effort and that is good enough to satisfy us and our users and which is the most likely to ever be implemented some day. We can't look for the best solution always.. we have to make compromises, otherwise, we won't advance...
That was my 5c. KaKaRoTo On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 06:44:53PM +0200, NoWhereMan wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Vivia Nikolaidou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Or ... an earth spinning? :) Or something that will show the user that the > > program is alive. I agree with the idea: as long as it's moving, it's > > loading, alive, leave it alone, if there's an error print it underneath... > > If the program is really stuck you won't ever be able to print anything... > :/ > imagine you're stuck in a loop: > a) the animation won't stop because the program *is* doing something > (looping) > b) you won't tell the user where it is actually stuck because you're in the > loop (and the program is not aware of being stuck) > if you're in a stage advanced enough, you'll probably be able to access the > status log, but what if the status log has not been loaded yet? > > bye > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? > Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier > Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > Amsn-devel mailing list > Amsn-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amsn-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Amsn-devel mailing list Amsn-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amsn-devel
