Re: [Ayatana] Indicators for showing progress

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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David Nielsen wrote on 17/04/10 17:05:
>...
> I've been giving this a lot of thought lately and I've come to the
> conclusion that one of the things I really dislike about Application
> Indicators is that most of the applications that come with support
> don't belong in the notification area.

You're right. We made a strategic error during the Lucid cycle, in
porting several applications to use application indicators that really
shouldn't be in the panel at all. It will now be more of a challenge to
go to the developers of those applications and say "well, actually, we
think you should be doing something else".

>                                        Banshee/Rhythmbox could be
> reasoned with providing a media service, but looking at downloads, I
> really just care about getting the file from A to B. Just like when I
> click a media file, I don't want 4 different players based on format.
> Yet this is the very situation we have for downloads, one client for
> Bittorrent, HTTP/FTP downloads are typically in every browser. It
> really should be a service. Another annoying problem with downloads is
> that the different clients aren't aware of each other so e.g. if I run
> Bittorrent uploading it isn't aware that it should throttle itself to
> not slow down require http downloads. Currently just leaving it in the
> default settings which one guesses is what most people will do, it can
> seriously hamper the delight of using the desktop. The only
> alternative, in Transmission at least, is to define a low impact slow
> mode to kick in at set times or as needed. 
>...

This seems like a really cool idea.

The throttling issue applies not just to network connections, but to
writing to the same disk where skipping from one area of the disk to
another is slow; it's quicker to finish one task completely before
starting the next. There could be some sort of priority system so that
more interactive tasks could jump the queue: "just hold on for a moment,
Transmission -- Gimp wants to save a 140-MB file to the same disk right
now".

Another benefit of integrating file transfers generally is that it could
be smarter about handling limited disk space. Nautilus pre-flights moves
and copies, so if there isn't enough space on the destination device --
or if there won't be by the time Nautilus has finished any previous
moves or copies -- it can warn you before the transfer even starts. But
if you're downloading a torrented ISO (for example) that will take up
too much space to leave room for Nautilus's transfers, Nautilus is
oblivious to the problem, which can cause one or multiple tasks to fail
when they run out of disk space. A standardized mechanism for "I'm
planning to write X amount of files to Y device, please reserve it for
me" would prevent this kind of problem.

All that said, I'm skeptical about the obviousness of any unified
graphical interface for different types of file transfer. And if there
was one, I very much doubt it would take the form of a menu. For
example, I'd want to be able to drag and drop tasks to reprioritize
them; it's possible to do that in a menu (as the Windows 98 start menu,
Netscape 4, and Internet Explorer have shown), but doing it in a window
is more forgiving of misclicks, especially when earlier tasks are busily
vanishing.

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