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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: K-ARTIST:Mime icons usability & visibility ;-)
From:       Eric E <whalesuit () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2002-04-19 20:13:33
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On Friday 19 April 2002 12:45 pm, Simon Edwards wrote:
> o make the computer smart enough to detect how long it is taking to do
> things, and then having turn the eye candy down if it's taking too long.

I think this is a very good medium-term goal for KDE.  This autodetection 
might apply to background tasks as well as eye candy - any "less important" 
processes that may be slowing down your computer.  Maybe we don't kill em, we 
just nice em.  This seems like a good app to write, test now and then, and 
add pieces to over a long period of time.

> The way I see it is this. People should be able say what kind of eye candy
> they want, and the computer should do it's best to comply. But at the same
> time the computer shouldn't to stupid things and if the user has asked for
> too much then the computer should detect that it is too slow and then
> automatically cut down on it. A slider between Fast and beautiful would be
> a way for the user to provide a hint to the computer as how much slowness
> they can tollerate.

The adaptiveness you're talking seem more general to me how many apps can you 
run at once, extra tray apps, etc., in addition to eye candy.

It seems to me that there are two levels to this:
1) The KPersonalizer level.  With a simple metric for how fast your computer 
is, KPersonalizer can tell you that it might not be a good idea to enable 
image previews.  If we wrote the "settings analyzer" so that it could be 
invoked at any time, any relevant control panel could ask for an analysis of 
the computer's speed whenever you propose to turn on some eye candy.  I say 
this with some trepidation, because I think such metrics could be pretty hard 
to write, but in this arrangement, you can ignore or turn off the analysis 
when you like.

250000) The adaptive level.  What you discuss sounds sort of like the computer 
trying to determine how responsive it is and disable stuff on that basis.  
It's pretty well known that task processing speed and perceived 
responsiveness are different things.  I think this kind of adaptiveness a bad 
idea at this stage, because it will fail frequently enough to deeply irritate 
users.

> As Alan Cooper mentioned, computers should kind of act like good employees.
> You give them a task and they go off and do it, without bothering you every
> 5 seconds with some stupid question about how to do thier job, or expecting
> you to mico-manage them all the time. And like good employees they
> shouldn't go and do stupid things that you could never have wanted. (For
> example, a 5 second redraw time on a menu because you turned the eye candy
> up too high. No one ever wants a 5 second redraw time).

Entirely true, and we all want to get there, but you're asking a team of 
volunteers to solve the next 50 years of HCI problems.  Let's go a little 
slow here, man, even if we are just polishing railings instead of building 
new buildings.

Cheers,

EE
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