Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: abrowse and rbrowse

[David Allouche]

On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 12:58:35PM -0400, James Blackwell wrote:
> 
> It seems to me that both commands run in the same time. So, the question
> is, "where do you think rbrowse is slower?". I'm aware of only one
> difference between rbrowse and abrowse -- namely, rbrowse buffers the
> patchlogs for a version and prints them out at once, abrowse prints them
> as they find them.

/me remembers asuffield comment about hip-shooting

That is a _very_ essential difference for the user. Very often, what is
important is not the time a given task really takes, it is the user
perception.

There is a well-known rule in GUI design: when a user complains that
task X "takes too long", but there is no simple way to make it faster,
just add a progress bar and a ETA indicator. That will probably make the
task run a little more slowly, but the complain will often go away.

That will give something for the user to look at for the duration of the
task if it's only a few seconds, and that will allow him to do other
things in the meantime if it takes really long.

One simple way to give feedback on the progress of a task, is to do
incremental display: show results as they come out. That's the reason
why web pages which can be displayed incrementally are so cool. That's
also one of the reason why PyArch is so heavily iterator oriented.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa