Well, my initial question certainly seems to have stirred some interest.
Thanks to everyone for the input. I think what I can draw from all this is
that:

1. The hourglass/busy icon is useful to give users an indication of when the
application is busy 'grinding' away at something and user input is not
expected/possible at that time - as in the application John described in a
previous post.

2. The hourglass/busy icon is NOT helpful when the application is doing some
processing that involves some visual effects, since the hourglass/busy icon
then interferes and obscures the display. This is a nuisance, when the
application is trying to display something on screen (whether it requires
user input or not). I would say most pygame applications fall into this
category (and the idea of pygame for PythonCE is what prompted this post in
the first place).

My conclusion would be that while there is no harm in having this icon
appear by default, it cannot be left to the system to decide when the icon
should appear. Therefore, a method of 'disabling' the icon, at least for the
duration of the execution of a script, would be useful.

Jared kindly pointed out that the ppygui package already has this covered,
so at least in the first instance I will see whether I can combine what I
have built so far with ppygui to see if I can achieve a satisfactory result.

Thanks again to all.

Adam


2008/8/13 Brad Clements <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> Christopher Fairbairn wrote:
>
>>
>> They use code along the lines of:
>>
>>   import _pcceshell_support
>>  _pcceshell_support.Busy(0);
>>
>> I haven't liked this, since it means each library needs to be aware of
>> something
>> PythonCE specific. For cleaness I think the native C part of the Python
>> interpreter can (and should) take care of this.
>>
>>
> Ah, this rings a bell.
>
> I think according to the Windows CE compatibility guide, you're supposed to
> show the hourglass until your application is "ready for user input".
>
> I believe it's up to the application .py file, not any libraries or
> interpreter, to make the Busy(0) call.
>
> Only the application author knows how many modules need to be loaded and
> when the application really has "started".
>
>
>
> --
> Brad Clements,                [EMAIL PROTECTED]    (315)268-1000
> http://www.murkworks.com                          AOL-IM: BKClements
>
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