[455] in Athena User Interface
Solution to user feedback problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Mon Oct 16 03:30:33 2000
Message-Id: <200010160730.DAA03191@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
cc: sbjones@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 03:30:30 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Susan and I were rbeing bitten by the following bug the other day:
Users launch an application from the menu system, but get no feedback
that the program is loading.
A really good solution to this problem (which was recently mentioned
on the gui list at gnome.org) is a program called xalf. If, as the
menu system maintainer, I start exmh with this command (which the user
never sees):
xalf -t 100 -l "Enhanced X Mail Handler" -s zathrun sipb exmh
rather than
zathrun sipb exmh
then the user gets a splashscreen that says "Starting Enhanced X Mail
Handler..." which disappears when the first exmh window appears.
For the uninitiated, zathrun is a little script that lives in the AUI
locker and does the following:
- Zephyrs the user if the program they requested is not available on
their current platform.
- Adds the specified locker (in this case, sipb).
- Runs the program out of the locker (in this case, exmh).
xalf also has the ability to add an hourglass entry to the tasklist
without creating a splashscreen, or to project a silly blinking star
(Mac-style?) as an indication that some program is starting. It can
also play cursor-changing games.
I've successfully used the program on my system here, and it seems
reasonably robust. I think it's a really neat solution, and I
recommend sucking it into the AUI locker at some point before public
distribution. It does have a few Gnome library dependancies.
-B.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
http://www.votenader.org
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