Re: ANNOUNCE: Style Guide available for review.

[Kai Wetzel <k wetzel welfen-netz com>]

Tom Tromey wrote:
[...]
> StyleGuide> "All operations that have a deterministic time to
> StyleGuide> completion that lasts more than three seconds should
> StyleGuide> indicate progress using a progress bar."
[...]
> This service could be configured in many different ways:
> 
> * # of seconds until pop up

Do you mean seconds elapsed or seconds estimated ?
If a process has been going on for three seconds before
the dialog is shown, this gives the impression that the
UI isn't responding very well.  However, it is in many
cases very hard to estimate how long a process will
take, especially before the first few seconds or so.

Furthermore, almost nobody would want a progress
dialog while downloading a web-page, while it's more
likely to want this for fetching e-mail from pop3, etc.
A little progress indicator in the status bar
like in Netscape would be fine for most people I guess.

So in essence I think it all depends and should be worked
out in more detail in the future :O)

> * Pop up a dialog for each progress status
> * Don't pop up a dialog, but display all ongoing tasks in a single
>   window somehow
[...]
Especially if the latter is the case it would be fine to
include tasks which last two seconds, as well as
tasks such as downloading a web page, etc. which wouldn't
get their own dialog even for novice users.

We should work when dialog boxes should be shown at all,
and when not, not only taking into account time.
IMHO this section could largely be a rough hint for
programmers only since the situation may be completely
different then foreseen.

kai