[maemo-developers] Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Kalle Vahlman <kalle.vahlman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  To be clear, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I do not like their restrictive
>  way of doing things. But I do acknowledge their expertise in the HCI
>  field, and I think I understand how they manage to produce the
>  compelling products that make people shell out whatever money Apple
>  feels like asking for them.

Agreed: they iPhone isn't the device for me. But as you say, they've
got an awful lot of investment in good UI, which is well-tested in
usability labs etc. Very few open source projects get proper usability
testing and - having been through it - it's remarkably effective at
pointing out flaws that you know your app had, but had justified to
yourself.

>  They get away with the "empty application" scheme simply because they
>  control every aspect of the application theme and (I suppose) there is
>  no way of changing it...

Theming is the one thing which kills the static image idea. There are
a number of alternatives:

  1) In the theme metadata, mark them as accepting the static images or not.
     Only display the static image if the theme author declares their theme
     "similar" enough.

  2) Take a screenshot at application start-up/shutdown take a screenshot
     and reuse it next time.

  3) Have a Glade XML file specified in the .desktop file which will be
     loaded, instantiated and displayed by Hildon Desktop whilst the app
     loads. Some mechanism should then be determined to pass that
     instantiated window to the app once it is ready.

Personally, I quite like the idea of (3), but the implementation could
be tricky. There's also the question then of using Glade for the basic
window - which projects may not want to do. However, this could be
considered the logical extension of maemo-launcher.

The Glade approach addresses the concerns of it being "smoke and
mirrors" only; and solves the problems with theming and disk space (a
Glade XML file is smaller and compresses better than a PNG file).

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/