> This was the UI element that they didn't know straight off. Their
> response to me telling them its function is to inform you that the
> application is currenlty busy rendering is "Oh, It's like an hourglass
> or watchface". I don't see the merit of forcing a learning curve of
> different icons not used elsewhere.
Tell them this is not a computer, it's a PDA, and they are very
different.
I personally think the thought bubbles are actually *MORE* intuitive
(and that's coming from someone who is very familiar with the UI of about 11
OS'). When you see the thought bubbles, you think "..thinking.".
When I see an hourglass, I see "latency" or "retrieving from disk",
or some such. The action behind the thought-bubbles is merely uncompression
(admittedly from RAM to RAM, not disk to RAM, but now could be flash to
RAM), and the viewer is "thinking" about how to render it to the screen.
Not only is this not a platform Microsoft users are used to (nor
should we try to make it such), but it's completely counter-intuitive to
what the bubbles really show up for.. thinking.
> For clockfaces / watchfaces option, it seemed on a PDA it seemed the
> clockfaces are used to indicate a clock app, or a time of an
> appointment. Therefore down to hourglass of the big two.
I disagree.. a clockface (with a spinning second hand, or even a
turning dial, like on SplashWallet.. check it out) is much more logical than
an hourglass. A third option is a "Loading [... ]" progress gadget, but
there's little space there for that. I'm not sure "animation" belongs here,
but if you're going to have an hourglass, and you want to have it "logically
similar" to what Microsoft does, and what people are familiar with, it
_DEFINATELY_ doesn't belong in the titlebar. Microsoft doesn't do that, and
not a single OS I'm familiar with puts the "Busy, wait a moment" identifier
in the title bar. Put it in the center of the screen, and blit it on (i.e.
don't use a form to load the bitmap, forms are "expensive").
> The argument of "I don't see what is bad, except for that is what so
> many other applications use" is not really a good argument against using
> a more familiar icon, in my humble opinion.
The _ONLY_ Palm application I have ever seen that uses an hourglass
(and it puts it in the middle of the screen) is MegaDoc. The reason for this
is because it tries to be an _EXACT_ Microsoft Word clone for the Palm,
complete with toolbars with little printer and folder icons, etc.
Remember, this is not a PocketPC, this is a Palm.
> I think premise should be to reduce learning curve, not increase it and
> have to dig through the docs to try and figure out what an icon is
> indicating.
You're increasing the learning curve, by trying to associate a
platform which has nothing at all to do with what "users are used to"
(Microsoft) to the Palm platform.
Does their HP calculator have an hourglass? How about their
Blackberry Rim pager? What about their Nokia cellphone? All of those also
hold similar data, and yet do not try to model a desktop paradigm.
> But both a thought bubble and hourglass were created for all color
> depths, and all are in CVS. It is no problem to wind them back, but I
> think it is a step backwards on out-of-the-box useability.
Funny, I would say based on the number of downloads, that 80% of our
users are using Microsoft Windows of some form or another (cvs hits is quite
another thing, there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous checkouts). I've
never heard anyone complain about the "usability" of that particular UI
element. The most complaints I see on usenet, mailing lists, here, and in
person about the Windows elements are about parser usability issues and how
to configure their .ini files properly.
If you want, make it selectable at runtime, and add both icons into
the viewer (though we take a size penalty for the <1% of users who will
change it). I personally will always compile it out, because the hourglass
definately does not make sense on the toolbar on a Palm platform.
/d
