[sugar] [PATCH] screenshots hurt

[Greg Smith]

Hi Marco,

I think its your call if this looks too invasive to stuff in the release 
at this stage.

I think task switching is important but not super-common. The frame open 
and close seems much more common and slowness there can appear like 
slowness within the activity.

Would it be possible to just take out the "screenshot" action on frame 
events?

Thanks,

Greg S

Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
>> By "problem" I was referring to the issue that the screenshots are used
>> to resolve.  I now am clear that the problem is that users can't figure
>> out what's what in their journal without screenshots.  The current
>> patchset attempts to resolve this issue in a way that doesn't affect
>> the performance of window change events in Sugar.
> 
> I can think of a couple of limitation with your approach (aside from
> the implementation issue we discussed in irc, which can be easily
> fixed):
> 
> 1 If you close the an activity while the frame is up, you will get a
> screenshot with some black areas.
> 2 If you close a non-active activity from the frame (icon palette) you
> would get a completely black screenshot.
> 
> I would be personally fine with these imperfections to get better
> window management performance.
> 
>>> Because with the current approach we can only take these screenshots
>>> while the window is visible on the screen, and taking them on window
>>> navigation events is the only way to ensure they are always updated.
>> If the activity is still running, then why does an updated screeshot
>> have to appear in the journal?  The user can easily reach the activity
>> by the same navigational system that takes them to the journal.
> 
> That's not a big loss to me.
> 
>>> There are a couple of ways we can take them only when saving the document:
>>>
>>> 1 Use gtk offscreen rendering (should be available in F10)
>>> 2 Use a composite manager (which has several side effects...)
>> Can these be implemented and tested quickly?
> 
> Surely not for 8.2, *maybe* for 9.1.
> 
> Marco
>