Re: [Usability] splash screen, session tangent

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 19:53 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> but, but, but ...
> I really wanted to pointlessly nitpick your mock-ups <sigh>!

TOO BAD! :-P

> > 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)

Not sure I follow where it was complicated, but I think this is a
miscommunication.

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

Yes, that's what I was trying to do.

> 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.

Hmm, perhaps my mockup or descriptions didn't go far enough.  But this
is esentially what I'm talking about.  

	Automatically loading the previous sessions applications if there is no
interaction from the user

	Displaying a list of applications that will be loaded before they are
actually loaded.

	Allowing the person to choose from the list of session apps which will
be loaded for this session.

> > 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.

I wasn't intending to halt or slow the startup, but to keep the splash
screen around for a certain amount of time.  Currently it disappears
when the apps being loaded have been launched, so this is an indefinite
amount of time.

> > 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"

Call it what you will, it's kind of a merge of those yes :-)  Perhaps
even a "Session Launcher Control Splash Screen"

> > 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.

MDI applications are a difficult situation to handle, one where I
wouldn't expect this session start to overcome.  The task list has the
same problem of how to show that this one application actually has
multiple documents inside of it.

Taking from the other mockup, I had envisioned something like this:
http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/splash-mockup-2.png

> 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.

I'm not sure that you were discouraging, but I appreciate the comments.

Cheers,
~ Bryan