unity-design team mailing list archive

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser@xxxxxxxxx>]

2010/4/14 Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>

>
> I think the idea of an aggregated "downloads" indicator has merit.
>
> I'm not sure about other long-running processes, like a copy-to-network
> or burn-cd action.


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. 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.

Download as a service is also a model that while it would require some
rewiring of the desktop would move code to a common place and move such
handling out of applications. At part of that trade off we'd get support for
any protocol handled in any application which was "DownloadKit" enabled.

I know that MonoTorrent already has a dbus interface, so I guess we could
probably get a demo up and running using that.

Thoughts?