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/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
