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Do something while waiting for user input

Since being idle consumes a lot of energy, a more aggressive way to accelerate user interaction is to speculate on what may be the user input and get the result ready before the next input is provided. For example, auto-completion in the virtual keyboard is one way of speculating. Moreover, tasks can be reordered to first present those windows on the screen that ask for user input, and then go ahead with processing of other tasks. This idea coincides with the traditional wisdom of dynamic time management [12]. However, it is used for a different purpose here. One can also deduce advice for implementing GUIs. First, being economical and terse is important, as we have shown that the window size and text size do matter in terms of energy. Second, choosing colors with fewer color components is beneficial for TFT LCDs as they consume less energy. Colors with partially activated component(s) should be avoided. Color changes from window to window and fine color patterns or highly decorated windows should also be avoided, and plain windows should be preferred.
next up previous
Next: Energy-aware GUI platform and Up: Achieving energy-efficient GUI designs Previous: Reduce redundancy
Lin Zhong 2003-10-13