Re: [Ayatana] Regarding the Sound Menu Spec's closing of inactive audio applications

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Thanks for raising this, Brett.

Brett Cornwall wrote on 07/02/11 17:28:
>
> Hi, Coming from bug 658590
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/658590>.
>
> I am arguing the sanity of having media players close when no music is
> playing. Since this spec assumes that the user has no purpose for the
> application when closing wouldn't it be safe to say that any wasted RAM
> would be shifted to the swap partition? That's what it's for.

The end goal should be that "quit" is something the computer takes care
of. Humans should no longer have to care whether a program is "running"
or not.

The messaging menu and sound menu are initial experiments in that. But
each has a challenge.

The challenge for a messaging application is: How can it check for
messages, regardless of whether the application is running?

The challenge for a music player is: How can it resume playing a paused
track at a moment's notice, regardless of whether the player was running?

Different applications will take different approaches to these challenges.

One option, for a music player that can launch quickly, would be to quit
immediately whenever you stop it playing and it has no windows open.

A second option, for a heavyweight jukebox like Banshee or Rhythmbox,
would be to wait for a minute or two before quitting, just in case you
resume playback in that time.

A third option would be for the player to spawn a separate process
devoted solely to playing the current track (and to responding to the
sound menu and hardware playback controls), while the main process exits.

> Constantly spending resources on starting and stopping a program can in
> the long run add up to a lot of wasted performance. Media players are
> among the most frequently accessed programs on computers - Should the
> CPU be hogged that much? Most media players scan the music library upon
> startup - When I start Banshee or Rhythmbox up it takes about a minute
> for the programs to scan my music. It doesn't make sense to have it do
> that every time I want to look through my library.

A fourth option (which could be combined with the second or third
option) would be to postpone scanning for music, whenever the player has
been launched with the request to start playing immediately.

> The close button's purpose has been obfuscated because of the systray
> and now it's been even furthur confused. Close /should/ close the
> program - however, invoking the close button to do different actions
> depending on the state of the program does not follow any sensical
> design - it has buried the design down a hole of larger complexity.
>...

A window's close button should close the window. Anything else the
program does should aim for the least overall distraction.

- -- 
mpt
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