Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview with linux .com

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> Yeah. however, if I remember well, last time we wrote about
> this people talked about some effects on lanch icons to show
> the app was running, not splashs that take out a fifth of
> your screen for tens of seconds.

True enough.  A dedicated panel area would be another candidate for
showing startup progress/information... an applet of some description,
that any compliant application could communicate its startup progress
to.  (That also scores over splash screens or pointer changes in that it
could potentially show the progress of multiple applications starting
simultaneously, where splash screens might just obscure each other.)

> Might be less obvious or more difficult to implement
> (however WM does this) but definitively a better answer.

Some of the guys here are looking at implementing some sort of
customisable startup feedback feature... along the lines of xalf, and
with plugins for different types of feedback (which also gives the
flexibility to provide, for example, audible progress indications for
visually impaired users).

Cheeri,
Calum.

---
CALUM BENSON, User Interface Designer  Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie			+353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems