idle detection

[Mark Doliner]

On Thu, 02 Aug 2007 01:34:16 -0500, Richard Laager wrote
> On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 21:21 -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> > If my Pidgin is set to "Show me as idle according to my keyboard and
> > mouse" use, and I've been using the keyboard and mouse for 50 seconds
> > (or even 30 seconds), I'm considering it a bug, and I'm not alone in
> > that.
> > 
> > We're currently every polling 3 seconds, which is fine by me. We used
> > to poll every 5 seconds, and we can swing that, too.
> 
> Where do you draw the line? Why is 5 okay but 60 isn't?

I think he drew the line at 3 :-)

I think it's important that we go from idle to available quickly because users
are dumb and don't understand that it could take up to a minute.  People
think, "hey, I moved my mouse and Pidgin didn't make me un-idle.  It must be
broken."  Or, if not broken then at least crappy software.

Computers these days are pretty fast... I don't think it's unreasonable to
wake up and check a variable every couple billion hertz.

-Mark