Our Marietta PDE (tm) software includes a database search engine,
which normally returns quickly, but can take a while if passed a
search criteria with no matches on a large database.
For example:10 seconds for a 400 KB file isn't really a long time
unless you're looking at a "frozen" screen.
Instead of using a Progress screen, which covers up the screen
displaying the matches as they are found, I put an animated display
on the very bottom of the screen, changing about every second.
Not really high tech stuff, but the phase "Searching..." appears to
march across the bottom of the screen while it is scanning though
file. I did that by having four hidden labels on bottom of the screen,
each with the same text, and the code then shows one at a time in
sequence while in search mode. (I hide the buttons before starting
the search and then re-show them when it has finished).
As I said, a pretty simple technique.
A similar technique could be used for the computation delay
described below, with a pop-up screen and a simple piece
of animation (we're not talking Disney cartoons here).
It just requires your computation logic to have some general idea
of where it is. A little bit of experimentation, but some kind of
screen activity at a one second interval seems about right.
Roger Stringer
Marietta Systems, Inc.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Subject: Re: twiddle thumbs in long computations?
>From: "Richard Hartman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 17:32:23 -0800
>Actually, all this says to me is that the program froze ...
>It's better than -not- inverting the button color, but even
>a static window saying "working..." would be better than
>just leaving the button black, imo.
>--
>-Richard M. Hartman
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>186,000 mi/sec: not just a good idea, it's the LAW!
>John Valdes wrote in message <5567@palm-dev-forum>...
>>
>>In pilOTP, I have to compute N md4/5/ssh1 hashes; when N is large,
>>this can take a good number of seconds or a minute or two. The
>>computation is triggered by pressing a "Compute" button on the main
>>form, so what I do as a progress indicator is simply keep the Compute
>>button inverted until the computation is done. This is non-animated,
>>but simple to code and sort gets the idea across that the app is doing
>>something. It also works back to PalmOS 1.0 :)
--
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