Re: Specifying thumbnailers as a service

["Mike Rooney" <mrooney gmail com>]

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be> wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-09-01 at 09:53 -0700, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>> On Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:49:31 +0200 Philip Van Hoof wrote:
>
>> > I think canceling is overkill. Making a thumbnail doesn't take longer
>> > than a minute (and a minute is an extreme case). Users don't cancel
>> > that.
>>
>> Strongly disagree.  I have a laptop, and say I'm on battery power.  If
>> I'm scrolling through a big list of images in my file manager, and it's
>> requesting thumbnails, they all get queued.
>
> Then you must tell the developer of your filemanager that he should only
> request thumbnails for visible items, and for items that are likely
> going to become visible soon. Instead of immediately all items in the
> opened directory.
>
> He could just prioritize the visible ones, and in a timeout check, if
> the window is not closing, request thumbnails for nearby invisible
> items.
>
> No need for cancels ...
>

I think you are missing the point. If I open a folder, it should
request all visible thumbnails, naturally. But if I immediately scroll
somewhere else, it should cancel the pending ones, so it can
prioritize on the ones I am at/scrolling to, instead of the ones I
left behind.

In order to have good response time you want to queue up something as
soon as possible, but then also abandon work as soon as it is no
longer necessary, so you can not waste resources and also improve
response time. This is just how good user-friendly programming is
done.

Mike Rooney
mrooney gmail com