unity-design team mailing list archive

[Roth Robert <evfool@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello!

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, 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. In most cases there are
only a few long-running operations running at once, so the menu shouldn't be
cluttered. This would break a bit the idea of getting information about
applications only by clicking their appindicator, but it would be helpful
for many applications that do not need appindicator, (like nautilus, cd-dvd
burners, web browsers downloading files).

Please comment, tell me what's your opinion about this...