[sugar] [PATCH] New Activity Launcher

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
> Haven't tried your new activity launcher (I wait for the binary to
> show up in Joyride), but your mentioning of the Frame reminded me:
>
> I have no idea of how I got there, but I have experienced a
> situation where there was a "disconnect" between the session that
> was being launched, and its icon in the Frame.  Basically the
> session vanished (e.g., couldn't find the executable that was
> supposed to be launched) but the icon in the Frame kept pulsing.

The new(er) launcher in my patch should partially address this,
inasmuch as it won't allow the disconnect which existed temporarily in
some builds.  In my new version, the launcher will *always* be shown
in place of an activity until it successfully launches (or officially
fails to do so).  It is possible to switch away and later switch back
to the launcher screen, as if it were a placeholder for the launching
activity.  That is, as long as there is a pulsing icon in the Frame,
there will also be a launcher window present.

> What I would like to see is for the palette on the icon in the Frame
> (while the Activity is being launched) to have not just 'Starting'
> as an entry, but also 'Stop' as an entry.  That way, if I am faced
> with a too-long-a-duration pulsing icon, I can tell the whole launch
> process -- including the icon -- to "just go away".

Me too!  This is an age-old topic that I brought up a long time ago
when we were first designing the activity ring
(http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1166).  Unfortunately, it's gone
untouched for quite a while, evidently because of difficulties in
actually knowing what process a given activity is connected with.  I
think it's something worth investigating again for 9.1, and I agree
that the best way to do this is to allow a "Stop" action from the icon
in the Frame, as usual.  We should also make that label read
"Starting..." or "Resuming..." as appropriate.

Finally, something that isn't done yet (but is facilitated by the
latest launcher patch and will be added  in 9.1) is notification on
launch failure.  An alert will appear within the launcher window
indicating the failure, and offer options such as "retry", "show
logs", and "cancel".  If the launcher window which fails isn't visible
at time of failure, we'll use the notification system to let the user
know something went wrong.

Thanks for your feedback!  Hopefully some other testers will chime in
(with nothing but praises) so we can actually get the changes into a
build...

- Eben

>
> mikus
>
>
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