RE: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus user testing at MIT

["Gerry Chu" <gerrychu bigfoot com>]

> cursor over a window means:
> 	- the window is listening to me
> 	- the cursor tells me about that window
>
>
> Mind you, I wouldn't want to use the cursor for every possible
> interesting app state, just to tell the difference between "I'm ready
> and waiting for input" vs. "Hold on, I'll be with you shortly".

I would suspect that a lot of people use large maximized windows instead of
the more efficient restored windows.  If that is the case, I have a hunch
that a wait cursor over a window would be generalized to mean to the user
that the entire computer is unresponsive and "thinking", since the window
takes up 99% of the screen area.  And I'm not sure if people get the idea
that one app can be "thinking" while another is responsive, they would
probably think that the whole computer is thinking.

Personally, I would go with the titlebar approach.  The taskbar way would
not take up any more space, though, it would just use the space reserved for
the icon, probably.  The downside of the taskbar way is that it is difficult
to correlate windows with taskbar items.

To put things into perspective, there are very few programs that are
inresponsive to user input for noticible periods of time that do not already
have other means of indicating state, eg, you can see some programs build
their ui on startup, at that time, the program is obviously not ready for
use.

Gerry