Re: Hi all

[Fabrice Colin <fabrice colin muscat com>]

What about having a transparent copy of the program icon in the top-left
corner (or better yet somewhere configurable) and make it blink like
crazy until the program has started ?

Ivan Jager wrote:
> Tom Musgrove wrote:
> >
> > Kevin wrote
> > > 3. When Macs (and Windows) start up a program, the mouse pointer has the
> > > sand timer come up or a watch had rotating.  When I've shown GNOME to
> > > first time users, that's what they first ask, "Is the program started?"
> > > A task bar should be "initialized" to show the "startup" of the program
> > > until it is ready to be used.  This should be a two step process: task
> > > bar is initiated and is "unuseable" until the program is ready, then it
> > > should be like normal task bars.
> >
> > Better would be to launch a splash screen immediately, so that they know the
> > program is starting, the hour glass is too subtle for some novice users
> > (hence they click on the icon 30 times and launch 30 copies of the program).
> > I seem to recall someone mentioning that KDE 2.0 does this...
> 
> I hate splash screens in general. Especially the one Star Office has. It puts a
> rectangle with a butterfly in the middle of the screen, and I havn't found any
> way to get rid of it so I can continue reading my mail while it starts. I know
> Star Office isn't part of Gnome yet, but I don't want all Gnome apps doing the
> same. To be precise, I don't want any of them doing it.
> 
> A new tasklist entry would be good, but it might not be so obvios to newbies.
> (it is not exactly where they were looking when they clicked)
> 
> An hour glass would be right where they are looking, but if it stays an hour
> glass for too long, like for Star Office or Netscape to start, it would be
> bothersome. And if it stays for just a while the user wouldn't know if it
> started and died or is still starting.
> 
> OS/2 draws some diagonal lines under the icon while the program or folder is
> open. It lets the user know that the program is running. For folders it also
> changes the icon from a closed folder to an open one. The lines aren't exacly
> beautiful, but they do the job. Also when you double click a program that is
> already open it just shows the open one. (unless you configured it to open it
> again) (if you right click it you can get either behaviour) When starting a
> program from the menu (not the right click one) it always starts another copy.
> (I'm not sure how good that is, I guess it's ok) Does the Mac do something
> similar, or was that BeOS?
> 
> Just another idea that wasn't discussed here AFAIK.