Re: [Ayatana] Indicators for showing progress

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hi Roth

Roth Robert wrote on 14/04/10 11:18:
>...
> A new idea came into my mind regarding the indicators: we have many
> applications that execute long-running operations... like when copying
> large files or many files, the nautilus icon appears in the system tray
> to indicate that some operations are in progress. In my opinion for
> cases like this, we should have the possibility to show the progress of
> an operation in an indicator applet menuitem. This could be useful for
> file operations, cd/dvd writing, sending or receiving file via
> bluetooth, downloading file from the internet, etc. 
> One possible solutions would be to add the functionality of menuitems
> with progress bars to the appindicator library, and everyone would
> implement menuitems with progressbar for their long-running operations,

It may be useful to introduce progress bars as one of the controls that
application developers can include in their status menus. (An existing
example elsewhere is Mac OS X's Spotlight menu, which contains a
progress bar while Spotlight is reindexing.
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nextsmallthings/3030562881/>)

> or the other one, which I lik better would be to have a progress
> indicator applet, which would contain information about all
> long-running operations. This would be more efficient, because we
> could hide it when there are no operations in progress, show it when
> there are operations running.
>...

This was the basic idea behind Mathusalem in 2007.
<http://live.gnome.org/Mathusalem>

The major awkwardness in the design was that it would aggregate, into a
single menu, tasks that would often have nothing to do with each other.
The only thing they would have in common was that they were expected to
take a long time, which is pretty weak.

Another awkwardness is that the tasks would be difficult to make visible
in the cases where you really want them to be. If I'm ironing my party
shirt while waiting for a mix CD to finish burning, I want to be able to
look over at the screen from a distance and see how close the CD is to
being finished. With a progress window, I can do that. With a menu, it
would be much smaller and more difficult to keep open.

One possible alternative to a menu would be showing progress in the
representation of minimized windows. That way I could glance down at the
icon for a progress window, about to click on it, and realize that I
didn't need to because the icon was already telling me what I needed to
know.

(Disclaimer: I don't really have a party shirt.)

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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