Ian Bicking wrote:
Ken Ritchie wrote:
www.opencroquet.org (especially the TeaTime components)
I just read the "Croquet System Overview" section of this:
http://www.opencroquet.org/Site%20PDFs/Croquet%20Programming%201.0B.pdf
It was a very nice overview of the architecture of the system. I like
the approach a lot; the description of the architecture makes me want
to bang out code *right now*, which is always a good sign. I'll try
to resist actually doing so.
Whether this should be reimplemented in Python or implemented in a
language-neutral way, I'm not sure. I can kind of imagine the Router
being a service accessible over dbus, but I'm not really sure what
that would accomplish. The dbus message format is also possibly
something to use (since Croquet messages, I assume, are tied to
Smalltalk). But I don't know if that even matters -- there's nothing
here that really facilitates inter-language communication, as it
assumes that all Islands (aka objects) use exactly the same code.
I also wonder if there's room for more sloppy communication. E.g.,
situations where out-of-order message execution is preferable to
blocking. If it damages the integrity of a simulation or 3D world, it
might be preferable to just block. OTOH, I think there are other
kinds of collaboration where responsiveness may be more important than
complete integrity. It perhaps depends in part on how good the
network connections are. What will collaboration feel like over
several hops on a mesh? What about over a satellite internet
connection? I have no idea how this will effect the experience. And
perhaps good message design can help with this anyway. For instance,
if you are editing text you don't necessarily want to send a message
for every keystroke; the UI can batch things up and resolve conflicts,
even if the underlying objects are less forgiving.
Let the application designer tune an Inter-Character Timeout (ICT) for
the activity, or use a built-in default. Thus, batches of keystrokes are
forwarded when either: (a) the keystroke-forwarding buffer is full; or
(b) the buffer is not empty and the ICT timer has just fired after the
user has paused between keystrokes; or (c) the activity loses focus
after the user elects to switch focus to another activity or inspect the
frame or whatever.
/Wondering.../ Do we already have an ICT timer (per application)?
The HCI folks could recommend some nominal (default) timer value between
keystrokes. I would expect it may vary based on accessibility options in
use. I wonder if it varies by culture or keyboard character set? In
fact, since keystrokes tend toward being "bursty" (grouped in small
batches), it would be "easy" (near-trivial algorithm) to *derive* a
*personalized* value based on recent keyboarding behavior of the user in
the context of the activity, influenced by both cognitive and
environmental factors (without having to explicitly take all those into
account).
So maybe I'm imagining the problem.
Good! Think ahead!
cheers,
--ken [kritchie]
_______________________________________________
Sugar mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar
