idea for running out of RAM

Martin Langhoff martin.langhoff at gmail.com
Sun Sep 28 04:56:43 EDT 2008


On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 25 Sep 2008, at 01:00, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> From your experience are your newcomers accidentally or intentionally
> launching too many Activities? Is it that they genuinely wanted to have N
> activities all running at once? I guess I'm thinking Eben's existing design
> proposal for adding recent Journal activities to the Home view icons will
> solve the accidental cases, but that intentional use (where the user does
> not understand - and most don't - resource usage) will still bite novice
> users until they've had their fingers burnt enough times.

Accidental - it's very hard to get a picture of how many apps are
running - there is no differentiation in the top of the frame between
the 3 things that appear there:

 - 4 icons for zoom levels / modes
 - 1 icon for a "magic" activity: journal
 - N icons for open apps

so I haven't spotted anyone "discovering" that N means how many apps are open.

(Given enough time and engineering-minded types, they will, but it's
not that easy...)

So UI changes that help make this clearer will probably be a good idea
for a 9.1 ... :-/

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
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