[Kde-games-devel] Statusbar messages in KPatience

[Parker Coates]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Dmitry Suzdalev wrote:
> Yep, certainly. But I also think it's not necessary to report *that* often.

I don't really think it's the job of a status bar to report things to
the user. The status bar is by design something that the user checks
to learn the application status. It is not a
notification area; we already have KGamePopupItem for that. (You
should know, Dmitry. You wrote it. ;) ) Dragon Player's status bar
doesn't "report" to me every time a second passes, it just politely
holds that information for me, so that I can check it if I'm
interested.

If you feel that KPat's solver is reporting to you too often we
shouldn't be trying to reduce the amount of information it shows, we
should should be analysing why you feel like it's reporting in the
first place. We should try to make the information as "statusy" as
possible.

> Speaking about dolphin for example, status bar changes when you move to the
> different entity. And in this case it changes to provide a different
> information - because one entity changed to another.
>
> In kpat's case we have one entity - the current game. And constantly telling
> same things about it has a little sense imho.
>
> Imagine for example such situation:
> You are hovering some file. Dolphin displays info about it in status bar.
> Suddenly it changes status bar text to:
> "Oh! Looks like this file's going to change. Checking..."
> and then...
> "Yep! File's changed. Good luck with new content!"
> and then...
> "Oh, it's changing again! Checking..."
> etc etc.
> What would you think? :)

The trouble here is that it takes time to determine if a particular
game state is winnable. If we just show "Calculating" while the solver
is thinking, people feel the status bar is too jumpy. So one might
propose that we just display the old state until the winnability of
the new state is known, but unfortunately if the user made several
quick moves, he might be fooled into thinking that the moves were good
and the game was still winnable, when in fact the solver was just
trying to catch up. Misinformation is always worse than accurate
information, regardless of how ugly the accurate information might be.
(Wow, that was, like, downright philosophical sounding.)

Dolphin actually has the same issue. Open up a slow remote location,
and the status bar won't immediately update to the new folder's
information. It has to wait for the details to be downloaded, before
it can do so. This is a lot less intrusive in Dolphin, though, because
lots of way more interesting things are happening in the main view
(the folder contents are displayed), so the user pays little attention
to the status bar. I think the fact that updates in KPat's solver
updates happen out of sync with updates in the game area is probably
one of the reasons people find it distracting. Unfortunately, there's
nothing that can be done about this other than to buy a faster
computer that can solve games instantly.

> So what i'm proposing is to stop telling user things that don't change.
> *IF* they change, then it's good to report them. Once. Not at every turn.
>
> For example when game starts to be unwinnable, kpat reports about it. When
> it goes back to winnable - it reports it again. Simple, clear and
> non-intrusive.

What about when going from unknown to winnable or unknown to
unwinnable or winnable to unknown or unwinnable to unknown?

I'm not sure I understand what you're proposing. Do propose that the
message show up temporarily then disappears? If so, see my comment
above about the difference between notifications and status. Or do you
propose leaving the text and only changing it when the winnability
changes? If so, see my comment above about misinformation.

> But issuing those "Calculating...", "Game is winnable/notwinnable" at every turn is too verbose imho.

Personally, I think we should do two things:
- Hide the status bar by default. The information there isn't
particularly useful to your beginning player and hiding it frees up
more room for our beautiful card decks, especially on wide screen
monitors.
- Adjust the messages to be more statusy. I was also going to propose
a modifying them to be roughly the same length to reduce the amount of
horizontal movement, but that obviously won't work for translations.

Parker