Pulsing icon delayed by 5 seconds
Pulsing icon delayed by 5 seconds
Description
Whenever an activity is started in sugar OS , we get to see a few seconds delay after clicking on the activity icon on the home screen and before the appearance of the pulsing icon animation. The delay also seems to be directly proportional to the complexity of the icon of the activity.
Solutions and their End Results
FIX # 1
Tried to reduce the time laag by increasing the duration between the occurrence of two consecutive frames of the pulsing icon animation.
- Result
This approach can be used to fix the case of an animation which has more than required FPS and hence couldbe smoothed out using this measure, but it did nothing to solve the main problem of reducing the preanimation delay.
FIX # 2
Tried to use the concept of “Frame Skipping” ( a concept commonly used in video games to improve the performance of the game) . Result: This approach couldbe used to fix the case of a laggy animation which runs on low FPS , but it can be used only after the animation starts so it doesnt help in improving the launch time of the pulsing icon animation.
FIX # 3
Tried to tweak the nature of animation by changing the animation to a ZOOM IN animation only from a ZOOM IN and ZOOM OUT animation. i.e. Tried to alter the pulsing nature by restricting the animation by both ZOOMING OUT and ZOOMING IN to only ZOOMING IN. Result: This approached completely changed the appearance of the pulsing icon but still didnt provide good enough delay reduction.
FIX # 4
Tried to stop the first frame of the animation from being filled with colors , so that upon starting the animation we would get to see a raw grayscale svg icon of the activity for the first frame only and then it would be seamlessly continued with the pulsing icon animation. Result : The idea was to reduce the rendering time of the first frame so as to speed up the appearance of the first frame of the animation and hence reduce the delay. This fix seems to work the best till date and has reduced the delay time by more than 50% as noted in the logs and reported by the community.
Contact
Anurag Chowdhury
anurag<at>seeta<dot>in