Hi Andreas,
On 15 Aug 2007, at 13:33, Andreas Höschler wrote: > thanks to Yen-Ju and others that worked on Busy.app. I haven't managed > to get Busy.app to work under Solaris yet, so I don't know how exactly > it gives visual feedback. Busy does not depend on the composite extension; it sets an atom on busy windows that is interpreted by a compositing manager, if one is present, so it should work on Solaris but without the full feature set. > But I followed the discussion about > translucent windows/titles (which I unfortunately also cannot try out > yet since Solaris 10 SPARC does not seem to support composite). But I > had the following the following thaughts about binding the visual > feedback to windows. Busy makes the whole window translucent (see Yen-Ju's screen shot), not just the title bar. > A common example of a busy application is the > following. > > • A user has started a database application client and successfully > logged in. EtoileMenuServer shows the database client as the active > application, no windows are open yet. > • The user selects Form - Customers in the menu. This should open a > form presenting some data from the database. Buildung the form from > markup, generating the uielements and displayGroups and bindings and > fetching data from a - possibly remote database - can take a while, > 10s > or more for large forms with many uielements and a thin database > connections. There are two issues here. If an application is doing something that will take a long time, then a well written application will handle it asynchronously (e.g. using EtoileThread and futures) and present some form of visual feedback to the user, such as a progress bar. Busy is there not to monitor whether an application is busy, but whether it is not responding. If an application has windows on the screen, but is not accepting input on them, then it is presenting a misleading visual clue; user interface components that are not available for user input. Busy.app addresses this by changing the pointer and fading the window, to make it clear that the thing that looks like a UI isn't really. > It would really help if the user got visual feedback in form of an > hourglass or the like. As mentioned I don't know whether Busy.app > already does this. But making the titlebar translucent wouldn't > help in > this case since there is no window yet! An application can set an hourglass (or, in the case of X11, a clock) pointer if it is doing busy things. Busy.app will set this cursor while the mouse is over windows that are not responding, and fade these windows if a compositing manager is running. The busy pointer will also be displayed when the mouse is over the menu and the active application is not responding (this is the same behaviour as OS X, by the way). David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
