Re: Busy-cursor?

[Gleef <dzol virtual-yellow com>]

On 4 Jan 1999, Alan Shutko wrote:
> >>>>> "M" == Marcus Brubaker <spoon@elpaso.net> writes:
> 
> M> I think a better idea than this would be a small panel applet to
> M> show disk access and perhaps CPU load.
> 
> But that wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing.  The point of the
> busy-cursor thing, as I understood it, was that it would show that
> there's an app launched from the panel that's on its way, so don't
> keep clicking on it.  

Windows uses two different hourglasses.  The full sized hourglass means
that the program in focus is busy, and is not accepting input.  You get
the hourglass when you first run the program (i.e. it gets focus), and it
does not go away until the program is initialized to the point where it
can take in input.

The other hourglass is a combined pointer / hourglass is triggered by the
application when it is busy doing things, but still accepts input.  It is
an indicator to the user that things are likely to go slowly.

The upshot of this is that in both cases, the change in the mouse cursor
is application driven, not GUI driven.  It would make some sense to have
GNOME applications do similar mouse pointer signals, but not for it to
change the mouse pointer for other apps (eg. Netscape).

-Gleef