[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Activity startup idea

[Wade Brainerd]

Opening up a conversation with Eben about the activity startup animation.
 The pulsing, scaling icon appears to slow down activity startup, at least
on slow hardware like the XO.
I suggested replacing the pulsing icon with a static one, and surrounding it
with dots at a rate of 1 per second.
Eben suggests an alternative, replacing the pulsing one with a blinking
icon.
It strikes me that the two could possibly be combined.

Anyone else want to weigh in?

Cheers,
Wade

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 3:27 PM
Subject: Re: Activity startup idea
To: Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com>


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Eben,
>
> There has been some back and forth about the pulsing activity startup icon
> hurting performance.  Benjamin Berg recently did some optimization to
> improve it, but it's still costing us something tangible, maybe a second
or
> two.

Yes, this sucks.  So small....yet so CPU consuming.

> I'm writing to ask if you would consider an alternate visual design that
> uses less CPU.  An idea of mine is to replace the pulsing icon with a
static
> icon, which becomes encircled by dots (one per second) in a clockwise
ring.
> Excuse my poor ASCII art (circles are hard to render!):

I'd much sooner replace it with a blinking icon, opposed to a pulsing
one, because the important visual metaphor is the transition from the
outline (activity bundle template) to colored fill (activity
instance).

I recognize that your suggestion conforms to the startup design, which
is nice, but I'd actually strongly prefer XO startup to mirror
activity startup, with the XO blinking/pulsing from stroke to fill, as
per the initial design.  Perhaps now that Sugar isn't tied directly to
OLPC (That is, boot sequence is dependent upon the distro, I think),
we should publicize a new startup spec and/or write some code to make
it work.

> Second 1
>
>       *
>
>       =D
>
>
> Second 2
>
>     * *
>    *
>       =D
>
> Second 3
>
>     * *
>    *
>       =D
>
> Second 4
>
>     * *
>    *
>   *    =D
>
>
> Second 5
>
>     * *
>    *
>   *   =D
>   *
>
> ....and so on until there is a full circle, at which point they start
over.
> The dots could be spaced apart around 15 to 20 degrees, which would mean
> about 20 seconds of startup time before they reach a full circle.
>
> In addition to reducing the screen updates to one per second (and turning
> them into simple dots versus a pulsing SVG icon) the user would be able to
> count activity startup in seconds, by counting the dots :)

We could likewise blink/pulse at such a rate.

> So, what do you think of this idea?  Or have you got another idea that
might
> reduce the performance hit?  I spoke with Benjamin and he said he would
> consider implementing an alternate design if it were approved by you.

I think the first step would be to try the blinking and see how much
time is saved.  If it's substantial, perhaps we should do it.  I
wonder, too, if this is a problem for Sugar in general or just on XO-1
hardware...

- Eben

PS.  Feel free to forward this to the lists, if you want.

> Best regards,
> Wade
>
>
>
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