[Kde-games-devel] Statusbar messages in KPatience

[Dmitry Suzdalev]

On Thursday 23 April 2009 00:16:26 Parker Coates wrote:
> 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.
Agreed.

> 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.)
Oh, that's a good explanation, thanks.

So my proposal won't work I guess, you're right.

> 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.
Yeah, i noticed that in dolphin too :)

> 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.
Yes, after your explanation I feel this is the way :)
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.
Well, just an idea :)

Cheers,
Dmitry.
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