So for version 2.0 I can think of three design solutions:
1. An extension of the current behavior. Departments with no available items
are still displayed, but navigating to one shows only the centered text "No
items are available in this department."
+ Simple.
+ No performance penalty.
– Frustrating ("why did you even bother showing it?").
– Cluttersome for users in corporate etc environments if they have been
granted permission to install items from existing software sources but not to
change sources ("this department is always empty and I can't change that").
2. The lobby screen is empty except for a spinner and progress bar, until the
Store has surveyed all departments and worked out which ones have items
available. Then all non-empty departments are displayed at once.
+ Appropriately cinematic.
– Slow: even if you want to choose something from the first department, you
have to wait until all of them have been queried.
3. The departments are surveyed in alphabetical order. As each is surveyed, if
it is non-empty it is displayed in the “Departments” section. As long as there
are departments remaining to be surveyed, a spinner is displayed in the spot
where the next department will appear.
+ Minimum delay.
– Future versions of the Store will have more than just “Departments” on
the front page, and the lower sections will jump around nastily if the
departments appear incrementally.
– Especially jerky if the window width and software sources are such that
the spinner for surveying “Other” takes up a line by itself, only to collapse
when the Store discovers there are no items in the “Other” department.
Are there any other solutions? Could there be some way of caching the
list of non-empty departments, invalidating that cache whenever the list
of software sources change?
** Changed in: software-store (Ubuntu)
Assignee: (unassigned) => Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
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Empty categories should not be displayed
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/419270
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