[sugar] perceived sugar performance

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 07:58:06PM +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> >  In a perfect world, you would be right. But that doesn't seem to be
> >  the world we are living in, because so many apps seem to need a banner
> >  while they launch (openoffice, gimp, banshee, etc.).
> >
> >  I'm not 100% sure that we need such a strong feedback during
> >  launching, but just saying that we'll make everything fast enough and
> >  slow activities won't bite us is a bit courageous, at least.

While "perfect" may be the enemy of "good", I do not believe that the
present state of mediocrity is either inevitable or "good enough".
However, I'm not presently submitting patches, so what do I know?

> * It reinforces the zoom metaphor.

Perhaps the implementation will convince me. Luckily for you, I'm not
the UI designer. :)

> * It deals with the problem of children clicking on 2-3 activities at
> the same time, which proved to be a real issue in the field (will
> faster activities address this? not sure).

If you actually want to rate limit activity startup - why not just rate
limit activity startup, perhaps with a "cooldown" effect? 

Instead, if you want to make it clear that people should be using one
activity at a time, why not queue up launch requests and allow
cancellation of all items in the queue?

> I'm still worried that the feedback might be too strong and
> unfortunately it's something hard to test until we have activity
> starting in 1.5 for real. If we had an acceptable form of feedback in
> the current builds I'd propose to first make activities faster and
> then play with feedback. Unfortunately, after the redesign, I don't
> think that's the case.

Write yourself a trivial activity that starts xterm and see how long it
takes to run. (I used the gtk hello world entries, way back when.)

Michael