[PD] finding objects ?

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 6 04:35:02 CEST 2012





----- Original Message -----
> From: Ivica Ico Bukvic <ico at vt.edu>
> To: 'Jonathan Wilkes' <jancsika at yahoo.com>; 'Фывапр Олджэвич' <tofuckof at inbox.ru>; 'João Pais' <jmmmpais at googlemail.com>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at; 'IOhannes m zmoelnig' <zmoelnig at iem.at>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 5, 2012 5:40 PM
> Subject: RE: [PD] finding objects ?
> 
>>  >>  Is there a way to quickly get a hash of all the doc files?
>>  >
>>  > I am of the conviction that the more automated things are, the better
>>  > the experience for the user. Hence, if this only adds a few seconds at
>>  > the start-up (assuming it is optimized enough, perhaps relying on a
>>  > secondary tool to do indexing that returns a list to tcl), I am all 
> for that...
>> 
>>  I'd _much_ rather have the automation happen when the user decides to
>>  click the button that opens the "Search dialog".  Even better, 
> I'd like the
> 
> New users will be totally oblivious to what this means.

It doesn't matter-- replace my text with your hypothetical progress bar.  It's still
clearly better to make the user wait and watch the progress bar _only_ when they
finally do something with the search plugin than it is adding several orders of
magnitude more load time to Pd for something many people may never use.

> When a new user picks up 
> pd (or in this case pd-l2ork, as was the case this summer with 30+ 5th-12th 
> graders) you want things to just work.

Search-plugin does work && it indexes at startup: yay!
Search-plugin does work && it indexes at first search (or first opening of search-plugin): yay!
Search-plugin does not work && it indexes at startup: Pd sucks!
Search-plugin does not work && it indexes at first search (or first opening of search-plugin): Search-plugin sucks!

Thus I conclude the proper place for the indexing is not at startup.

> New users can understand better start-up 
> progress bars than they can continuous hang-ups during operations,

If it just works then there shouldn't be any hangups.  If there are hangups, with my way
the new user already knows it is probably related to the search plugin and
not, for example, an audio interface, midi settings, startup flags, etc.

> particularly 
> if that also requires potentially confusing options that have to be activated 
> manually.

Well, in either case it's not necessary to have options for manual intervention.
But I will not add potential headaches for users who may never
even use the search-plugin.  If it works, it works; if it doesn't it shouldn't affect
the user unless they use the plugin.

I just went through problems with Gnome 3 trying to run a bunch of tracker-* services
to index my harddrive and blowing up cpu usage, so I speak as a user when I say
that I don't like that design.

-Jonathan

> Perhaps adding an option to the preferences file to disable default 
> behavior of indexing at startup could be a compromise between the two and if the 
> auto-indexing is disabled, you also get the manual button for indexing appear in 
> the browser (or wherever appropriate)...
>



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