unity-design team mailing list archive

["Paulo J. S. Silva" <pjssilva@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Em Ter, 2009-06-16 às 15:48 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia escreveu:
> On 16/06/2009 Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> > 
> > Ted Gould has been a proponent of a system / hardware indicator, and 
> > I've been working on how to handle things like USB-unmount and 
> > Bluetooth-connect and am coming round to the idea. What do you guys 
> > think? If there's support for the idea, we could do a round of design 
> > work and present it here for more detailed discussion.
> > 
> 
> Do you mean like the messaging indicator but for system messages? If so, 
> would it also handle update-manager interactions? I think this has been 
> proposed by many both here and on the u-m bug so there should be wide 
> consensus. I'd love it.
> 

+1 here.

Finally, I would also like to emphasize the fact the the "vocal minority
of power users" that are complaining about the new update-notifier
behavior would be happy enough if there was as *supported* way to fall
back to the old behavior (or to adopt the new behavior suggested in my
first email). The main problem for us, pop-under "haters", is that there
is no *supported* way to avoid it but to turn off update-notifier
entirely.

Finally, I would like to stress that the new update-manager introduced
what I think is a paper cut. Here is what usually happened to me before
I reverted update-manager back to the old behavior using the unsupported
option:

I see the pop-under in the middle of my work, decide to close the
update-manager to keep on working (and to get rid of the update-manager
application in my alt-tab list). Update manager closes and only comes
back many days later. There is no trace left in that session that I have
updates available.

To me this is a paper cut, and a dangerous one, as I would be updating
my machine less often. A much better approach was already suggested in
this thread. Update-notifier should display a permanent notification (in
the notification panel or in the indicator-applet or in the new system
indicator, or wherever people think is appropriate, but with a clear
visible sign) to remember me that the updates are available if the user
closes update-manager without upgrading. 

Paulo.

Obs: Sincerely, it is easy enough for me to turn off update-manager
completely and still get permanent notifications, a simple scripts that
calls apt-get update followed by a email saying that updates are
available would do. However I do care about other users that can not
code that easily. I do think that the new behavior is much worse than
the old one and can in many cases lead to fewer updates not more.


-- 
Paulo José da Silva e Silva 
Professor Associado, Dep. de Ciência da Computação
(Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept.)
Universidade de São Paulo - Brazil

e-mail: pjssilva@xxxxxxxxxx         Web: http://www.ime.usp.br/~pjssilva

Teoria é o que não entendemos o     (Theory is something we don't)
suficiente para chamar de prática.  (understand well enough to call
practice)