[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Avoiding killing slow-starting applications

[From: Matthew Garrett]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 03:24:51PM -0200, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> On 10/21/05, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> > Why? We have startup notification for that. The application is useless
> > until the model has been trained, and spending time generating a splash
> > screen is time that could be better spent.
> 
> That's bad usability and generating a splash screen isn't expensive at
> all... you don't need a fancy image, just a GtkLabel.
>     If user launched your application and it doesn't show anything,
> he'll think that it failed and will try again. Visual feedback _IS_
> important, so give it as soon as possible.

We have visual feedback. There's a small window in the top right corner 
that performs that function. Duplicating it at an application-specific 
level just reduces interface consistency.

> Also, I don't know your application since you didn't say much about
> it, but there isn't any way to cache this "training" so it doesn't
> have to be done every time?

Yes, but it involves rewriting fairly large chunks of the statistics 
engine. It's certainly on my TODO list.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org