[Usability] splash screen, session tangent

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Hey all ~

Somewhat tangential issue to what has been discussed, I wanted to share
some of the session / splash screen stuff I was working on a while back.

In an effort to improve the usefulness of the session I worked on some
ideas for making GNOME be better about always remembering what you were
running.  I did this because it seems that session should always be
remembered so that logging in and logging out isn't such a painful thing
to do, i have see people book-marking their web pages to temporary
folders so they could log out/shutdown and be able to return to their
work-flow later.  The inherit problem with always remembering what's
running in the session is that something you don't want to the computer
to startup all those apps you were using.  Sometimes you just want to
log in and get one thing without having email and the web all starting
up.

So anyway, I'm sure everyone is looking for mockups, so I made some ;)

http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/session-start-all-on.png

http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/session-start-with-x.png

NOTE:  These are just idea generating mockups, for us to have a
civilized discourse lets not dive into anything about HIG compliant
padding or stuff like that for now :-)

My idea is to make the splash screen more interactive.  Save all the
apps in your previous session and then on login we show the applications
being loaded, but make the loading interactive.  

Here are some of issues I'd like to discuss:

You need to allow enough time for people to turn on or off the different
applications that might load into the session.  How do we assess this
time?

Do we keep the splash around while we load all the apps or just until
the desktop is loaded?  You can't wait for apps that are blocking on
some kind of I/O so how do we handle this?

Document based applications, like do we stop the loading of the web
browser all together or allow people to stop loading of certain web
pages?  If so, how do we display that?  Expand the items are we click
stop for?

Rock on,
~ Bryan