[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Libreoffice] Performance improvements for calcs' sheet actions

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Michael, Markus, ... :-)

Am Freitag, den 10.06.2011, 10:19 +0100 schrieb Michael Meeks:
> Hi Christophe,
> On Wed, 2011-06-08 at 00:18 +0200, Christoph Noack wrote:
[...]

> 	If it takes four seconds we get perhaps the worst case: for the first
> 1/2 second we'll not see anything - then we get 12%, then 25% then 37.5%
> then 50% and so on over the remaining 3.5 seconds. Personally I think
> that is 'smooth enough' 
[...]

Mmmh, it may still feel "old school" - although I'm not representing the
visual design side (I'm more experienced in usability/utility stuff).
So, if there is a chance to both keep a decent performance and let it
behave nice, then ... you know ;-)

> 
> > Thus, if we know (and its possible), we should simply avoid the progress
> > indicator for such fast operations.
> 
> 	Sure - so this should be quite easy; after our first half-second, we
> can judge the percentage completeness, if it is >50% we can not show it
> [ though we would need to un-conditionally if it is not complete another
> second later I guess ].

Since a few days passed, I was thinking whether the initial stated 500ms
do really fit ... but this is something that might be easily tweaked in
the code, or?

[...]

> > By the way, another question. One of the things that might (visually)
> > drive people nuts is the fact, that we (almost) use the whole width of
> > the status bar to show the progress bar ... on large screens, this leads
> > to 50cm progressbar flashing.
> 
> 	Wow - so; it would be great to shrink that progress bar - that would
> simultaneously make it much faster to render; mine is perhaps 1600
> pixels wide so with a gradient so: perhaps this is the key fix.
> 
> >  Would it be possible to adapt the progress
> > bar to be (let's say) 200px (if space permits), or smaller (if the LibO
> > window size isn't adequate). Visually, this would be an improvement ...
> 
> 	Yes ! :-) it is a win-win I think.

That would be great! I felt free to collect some (more detailed)
information in the Design Team's Whiteboards section. Please have a
look ... at the moment, I omitted the "wait 500ms stuff".

My rationale: There is a lot (let's use Michael's usual terms) "progress
bar nastiness" in LibreOffice, so I thought it would be great to have a
common resource for that.

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Progress_Indicators

> > For those who want to dig a bit deeper into the "beauty and utility of
> > progress indicators",
> 
> 	Thanks for the helpful input; good stuff. Markus - do you have enough
> to go on ? and/or are you excited :-)

Markus, will that work? Please tell me what you need.

Cheers,
Christoph