On Dec 1, 2007, at 1:56 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
...On 29 Nov 2007, at 22:58, Martin Harris wrote: ...Also, has there been any talk about making UIs accountable for real- time responsiveness (low-latency interactivity)? Is there anything in the overall system that could require a UI to respond in 10 seconds, 1 second, etc?... One example is that Mac OS X's "spinning beachball of death" cursor<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor> is not (usually) set by the application. It is set by the underlying toolkit, if the application has not examined its event queue in the past ~2 seconds. That makes UIs "accountable" in the sense that the busy cursor is a sign of a badly-written application, and users complain accordingly....
Similarly in Ubuntu, with "Visual Effects" turned on, a window goes grey if it has stopped responding for a second or two. Once it resumes responding, its colors return.
Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/