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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: Energy-aware GUI platform and
Up: Achieving energy-efficient GUI designs
Previous: Reduce redundancy
Lin Zhong
2003-10-13