Details
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Improvement
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Status: Closed
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Minor
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Resolution: Later
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Adobe Flex SDK Previous
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None
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None
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Affected OS(s): All OS Platforms
Affected OS(s): All OS Platforms
Language Found: English
Description
Currently, an app can use the "showBusyCursor" property of HTTPService and the other RPC classes to automatically show a busy cursor at certain times. But the problem with this is that the busy cursor is implemented in the Flash player as just a sprite – it is not using the OS-native cursor widget. As a result, it has some strange and disconcerting behavior. For example:
- Sometimes, the busy cursor can appear to be extremely jittery – e.g. when you move your mouse, the busy cursor doesn't move for a while. In terms of implementation, the reason is clear: the main thread of the player has not yet processed the mouse-move messages. But the user experience can be quite jarring. Users are used to the cursor moving when they move the mouse.
- At times, both the OS cursor and the Flash-drawn cursor will appear in the same spot. Other times, if you move the mouse out of the area of the Flex app, Flex keeps showing its animated cursor, while the OS shows its own cursor in a different spot.
One way to fix this would be if the player supported native cursors; I have logged that separately. But what I am proposing here is that Flex support an alternative way to indicate busy state: some sort of widget that would appear in a fixed location onscreen, and would indicate busy state.
For example, consider that in most web browsers, when the browser is busy (loading a page), the browser's cursor in the upper right corner starts animating.
What I am picturing is a control that would be:
- positioned in some fixed spot; might default to somewhere near the upper right corner of the app, or might default to something large in the center of the app.
- would probably default to partially transparent.
In terms of implementation, it might make sense to have a widget, e.g. <mx:BusyIndicator>, and to also have a new attribute for mx:HTTPService and other tags, e.g. a new "showBusyIndicator" attribute.