I just took a look at my Widsets application from home, where I do not have EVDO coverage. I spent a couple minutes looking at five progress bars, each creeping towards 100%. I then put the phone down because I had things to do. When I picked it up again, it did indeed have everything up to date, but I was no longer in a space to read anything, so I exited the application.
This behavior was unnecessary. If the "first" feed had been updated first, I could have been reading that while the remaining feeds were loading.
If your on-device application has a number of different feeds, consider loading the feeds asynchronously.
Great to see an analyze of our solution – and even suggestions for improvements – thanx! Because some details about what happened are missing (like what had been done on the web, what was new, what was old, were widsets moved, what were messages shown on the mobile i.e. what stage was the client in, etc) I’ll have to give more general answer.
Anyway, at the “Synchronizing” stage (maybe we should call it Asynchronizing
no pun intended) the general UI (positions, etc) are checked and potentially changed, if such activities have happened on the web dashboard. After this the actual content is updated, which happens asynchronously.
Usually slowness, loading, etc happens when you have added new widgets on the web and/or moved their positions. That’s when you will see the progress bars. If you just exit and then start then application again (i.e. the normal case), things work much more smoothly.
There are still a few optimizations that we could do, in order to improve the experience on really slow lines and/or phones with very limited memory, but they are still in the pipeline. Hopefully this doesn’t stop you from using WidSets!
Cheers