Re: (severe) performance issues

["Paul Davis" <pjdavis engineering uiowa edu>]

On 3/30/07, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 22:02 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> > To me, a GtkLabel is a 'label' (get it?). A label shouldn't change. It
> > tells the user what a given piece of information is.
>
> That doesn't make much sense to me. Information can change over time,
> and it's normal to show this to the user.
>
> If there's problem with showing changing information, at a rate that the
> user can perceive, then maybe that can be dealt with as an option. I'd
> be surprised if that requires an extra widget, though ABI compatibility
> might convievably make that necessary.
>
> --
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc murrayc com
> www.murrayc.com
> www.openismus.com

I've tried about 5 times to reword what I mean but nothing is comming to me.

So I've spent about 15 minutes going through software on this computer
looking through different windows trying to find an example of a label
that changes to convey some interesting piece of information. I can't
find any.

The only example I can think of is from my bittorrent client. And its
got a fairly horrible UI.

Note that we're describing a situation where the data thats changing
is interesting precisely because its changing.  The change in the data
is as interesting or more interesting than the value itself.

I just thought of a situation where you might want to use a table of
labels to describe some properties of an object.  Obviously, for
different objects, the labels would change.  This isn't quite what I'm
thinking of. (There are always exceptions to the rule. There's
probably even a rule thats an exception to the exceptions rule which
provides us with an intersting paradox...)

Anyway, all I can really say in conclusion is that when I think of
good UI design, I don't think table of rapidly changing values. I
think fancy graphics that show important information at a glance along
with some method of reading a precise value.

Paul Davis