[sugar] perceived sugar performance

[Eben Eliason]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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?

So, I don't necessarily want to impose a hard rate limit.  It may very
well be the case that I know that I want Terminal and Chat open,
pronto, and that they both launch fairly quickly for me even when
launched at the same time.  It might also be the case that I know I
want 3 or four activities open for a project workflow (say, Record,
VideoEdit, and AudioEdit (assuming they existed)), and I know they
take a minute or so.  I might want to launch them all and go get a cup
of coffee.

>  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?

This seems like a much more interesting option to me, if the
predominant feedback from others opposes the launch mechanism I'm
proposing.  Perhaps this is even a wise thing to do regardless of
which feedback mechanism we use.  Focusing on the first activity
launched before wasting time to launch a bunch in parallel might
indeed be better.  (Again, only truly better if we can prevent the
remainder of the launching activities from stealing focus when they
finish launching!)

- Eben