[Sugar-devel] Sugar as a Green Design Pattern (James Cameron)

[Lionel Laské]

Hi Gary,

>However it is worth noting that – wearing my Sugar Activity hat – Sugar
Activities have and continue to need to play their part in the mix as well.
There are >many activity examples that make specific power usage decisions.
To take one case, the Physics Activity is a computationally expensive
programme and it >takes great care to suspend its simulation processing when
the user switches away from the activity view. You can also argue that
efforts of the Sugar >toolkit/shell developers to keep their eyes on the
goals of low memory and low processing requirements has and is critical to
the success of keeping >resource consumption as low as possible. With my
Design Team hat on, I'd love to see us improve the Sugar user experience
with much wider use of >animation transitions and compositing, but this
often has a notable impact on memory and cpu usage, so again we've tried to
avoid such system >requirements.

Hmmm, interesting point.
Or course the hard thing is to do the right balance between CPU usage and
quality of user experience.
BTW, reducing user experience to reduce CPU could lead to stupid decision.
Do you imagine something like doing a classification on activities depending
of their consumption ? Something like:
- Activities with poor consumption: Write, Draw, ...
- Activities with medium consumption: TurtleArt, ...
- Activities with high consumption: Record, Physics, ...

So, Green Design can't be separate from usage.

	Lionel.