Re: [Usability] FW: UI Responsiveness

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Nov 30, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Calum Benson wrote:
> On 29 Nov 2007, at 22:58, Martin Harris wrote:
> ...
> > Also, has there been any talk about making UIs accountable for real-
> > time responsiveness (low-latency interactivity)? Is there anything
> > in the overall system that could require a UI to respond in 10
> > seconds, 1 second, etc?
>
> Not quite sure what you're getting at here-- could you give an example?
> ...

One example is that Mac OS X's "spinning beachball of death" cursor
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor> is not (usually) 
set by the application. It is set by the underlying toolkit, if the 
application has not examined its event queue in the past ~2 seconds. 
That makes UIs "accountable" in the sense that the busy cursor is a 
sign of a badly-written application, and users complain accordingly.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/