<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"><html><head><meta name="qrichtext" content="1" /><style type="text/css">p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; }</style></head><body style=" font-family:'Sans Serif'; font-size:10pt; font-weight:400; font-style:normal;">On Thursday 23 April 2009 00:16:26 Parker Coates wrote:<br>
> I don't really think it's the job of a status bar to report things to<br>
> the user. The status bar is by design something that the user checks<br>
> to learn the application status. It is not a<br>
> notification area; we already have KGamePopupItem for that. (You<br>
> should know, Dmitry. You wrote it. ;) ) Dragon Player's status bar<br>
> doesn't "report" to me every time a second passes, it just politely<br>
> holds that information for me, so that I can check it if I'm<br>
> interested.<br>
Agreed.<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"><br></p>> The trouble here is that it takes time to determine if a particular<br>
> game state is winnable. If we just show "Calculating" while the solver<br>
> is thinking, people feel the status bar is too jumpy. So one might<br>
> propose that we just display the old state until the winnability of<br>
> the new state is known, but unfortunately if the user made several<br>
> quick moves, he might be fooled into thinking that the moves were good<br>
> and the game was still winnable, when in fact the solver was just<br>
> trying to catch up. Misinformation is always worse than accurate<br>
> information, regardless of how ugly the accurate information might be.<br>
> (Wow, that was, like, downright philosophical sounding.)<br>
Oh, that's a good explanation, thanks.<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"><br></p>So my proposal won't work I guess, you're right.<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"><br></p>> Dolphin actually has the same issue. Open up a slow remote location,<br>
> and the status bar won't immediately update to the new folder's<br>
> information. It has to wait for the details to be downloaded, before<br>
> it can do so. This is a lot less intrusive in Dolphin, though, because<br>
> lots of way more interesting things are happening in the main view<br>
> (the folder contents are displayed), so the user pays little attention<br>
> to the status bar. I think the fact that updates in KPat's solver<br>
> updates happen out of sync with updates in the game area is probably<br>
> one of the reasons people find it distracting. Unfortunately, there's<br>
> nothing that can be done about this other than to buy a faster<br>
> computer that can solve games instantly.<br>
Yeah, i noticed that in dolphin too :)<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"><br></p>> Personally, I think we should do two things:<br>
> - Hide the status bar by default. The information there isn't<br>
> particularly useful to your beginning player and hiding it frees up<br>
> more room for our beautiful card decks, especially on wide screen<br>
> monitors.<br>
> - Adjust the messages to be more statusy. I was also going to propose<br>
> a modifying them to be roughly the same length to reduce the amount of<br>
> horizontal movement, but that obviously won't work for translations.<br>
Yes, after your explanation I feel this is the way :)<br>
I have some other idea: what if we introduce some kind of tiny semaphore-like widget which would report a solver status to the user. Something like a color-changing led maybe. with a tooltip which has longer description on what this state means.<br>
Well, just an idea :)<br>
<p style="-qt-paragraph-type:empty; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;"><br></p>Cheers,<br>
Dmitry.</p></body></html>