Re: Busy-cursor?

[Marcus Brubaker <spoon elpaso net>]

I think a better idea than this would be a small panel applet to show disk
access and perhaps CPU load.  I know there are already CPU load applets,
but something along the lines of a little light that blinks when there is
disk access or CPU load goes above a certain point(.4?).  It would be
cleaner, easier, and just better than changing cursors.

Marcus Brubaker
spoon@elpaso.net
http://www.elpaso.net/~spoon


On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, [iso-8859-1] Peter Åstrand wrote:

> 
> Starting large applications takes a long time. For example: It takes about
> half a minute to start Netscape on some of my machines. This makes users
> confused, because there is no indication of that the computer "is
> working." He/she may think that something is wrong, that they missed the
> icon or something, and tries to start the application again. The result is
> even longer startup-time, and two copies of the same program running.
> 
> MS Windows 95/NT and OS/2 (i believe) has solved this by attaching a
> hourglass symbol to the mouse cursor, indicating that the computer is
> working. I think this is a great solution: Is it possible to implement
> this in Gnome? 
> 
> Some people has told me it's impossible, because you can't tell which
> windows belongs to which processes. My idéa is to do it like this:
> 
> 1. When applications are started "from Gnome" (the panel etc.), Gnome
> changes the mouse-cursor to a pointer with a "busy"-symbol. Applications
> started from the commandline can use wrapper-scripts, if necessary. 
> 
> 2. When a new window is created, the cursor is restored. 
> 
> Of course this means that if you start two programs, the cursor will be
> restored when the first application is ready. But it's a lot better than
> nothing. (I've even noticed this behavior in MS Windows, actually). CDE
> has a blinking light in it's panel working quite like this, except that
> it is blinking for maximum of five seconds. 
> 
> Sometimes you want to start non-X applications from the panel, and in this
> case the cursor should not be changed. Maybe this can be solved by adding
> a checkbox to the "Advanced section" in the launcher properties,
> to disable cursor-change at launching.
> 
> Comments?