Re: [Usability] splash screen, session tangent

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Bryan Clark wrote:

> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:06:27 -0400
> From: Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>
> To: Gnome Usability List <usability gnome org>
> Subject: [Usability] splash screen, session tangent
>
> Hey all ~
>
> Somewhat tangential issue to what has been discussed, I wanted to share
> some of the session / splash screen stuff I was working on a while back.
>
> In an effort to improve the usefulness of the session I worked on some
> ideas for making GNOME be better about always remembering what you were
> running.  I did this because it seems that session should always be
> remembered so that logging in and logging out isn't such a painful thing
> to do, i have see people book-marking their web pages to temporary
> folders so they could log out/shutdown and be able to return to their
> work-flow later.  The inherit problem with always remembering what's
> running in the session is that something you don't want to the computer
> to startup all those apps you were using.  Sometimes you just want to
> log in and get one thing without having email and the web all starting
> up.
>
> So anyway, I'm sure everyone is looking for mockups, so I made some ;)
>
> http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/session-start-all-on.png
>
> http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/session-start-with-x.png
>
> NOTE:  These are just idea generating mockups, for us to have a
> civilized discourse lets not dive into anything about HIG compliant
> padding or stuff like that for now :-)

but, but, but ...
I really wanted to pointlessly nitpick your mock-ups <sigh>!

> My idea is to make the splash screen more interactive.  Save all the
> apps in your previous session and then on login we show the applications
> being loaded, but make the loading interactive.

sounds like an interesting premise, (although I would prefer to keep it
simple)

why bother showing users exactly what is loading if they have no choice in
the matter?

It might be useful to have a list of what is about to be loaded and be
able to pause/cancel the loading of some items.

> Here are some of issues I'd like to discuss:
>
> You need to allow enough time for people to turn on or off the different
> applications that might load into the session.  How do we assess this
> time?

I'd rather avoid further slowing down start-up, it seems conter
prodcutive.

> Do we keep the splash around while we load all the apps or just until
> the desktop is loaded?  You can't wait for apps that are blocking on
> some kind of I/O so how do we handle this?

this seems less like a splash screen and more like a kind of "Launcher
Control Panel"

> Document based applications, like do we stop the loading of the web
> browser all together or allow people to stop loading of certain web
> pages?  If so, how do we display that?  Expand the items are we click
> stop for?

I think the multizilla extension for Mozilla (or Firefox)
remembers what pages you had open, and it seems to me that it would be
more useful to try and encourage applications to be smarter than
overcomplicate things at startup.

sorry to be so discouraging, managing sesssions certainly has room for
improvement I just dont happen to think this is the way to do it.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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