Dialer UI Design

Tue Sep 30 16:00:46 CEST 2008

On 30/09/2008, at 11:34 PM, Nishit Dave wrote:
> If a GUI is not responding it's a problem with how the
> program is structured, it should be doing something asynchronously
> instead of blocking the event loop.
>> I just hope everybody follows best practices. At the end of the 
> day, all I need is something that is responsive.

Yep. I guess one thing that makes it difficult is that the author of 
a program usually knows what the program is doing in detail. They'll 
be thinking something like "oh, the program is just enumerating the 
doodad configuration, that's why the interface has frozen". So they 
won't really notice the problem because they have a good idea what's 
happening internally. While a user is thinking, hey I just clicked 
the settings button and the program has locked up for no good reason, 
what the heck?!?
You can try submitting a bug report about it, but unfortunately, 
particularly for projects with small communities, the developer is 
likely to think, "hmm, good point, but it'd be more fun to work on 
adding a new whiz-bang instead, besides it doesn't really bother me, 
can't they just be patient and wait for it to finish loading?" At 
least in a project with a larger community these sort of small tweaks 
to how the interface looks and behaves can serve as a fairly safe 
entry point for developers new to the project to learn the code 
base. To a developer these sorts of things can really seem like 
trivial details not worth bothering over, but often they're really 
quick to fix and can dramatically improve the user experience-- 
they're just not very exciting to work on.
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