unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jim Rorie <jfrorie@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 13:48 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Jim Rorie wrote on 22/04/10 01:42:
> >...
> > 
> > In short, what provisions have you made to provide the same short cut
> > functionality without introducing additional clicks?
> 
> Much of the time you won't need to switch to the player; you'll be able
> to perform common actions directly from the menu.

Can you give examples of either case?  "Much of the time" is where the
devil lives.

For example: Would a person be able to swipe the sound icon and see the
playing track.  Would they be able to pause the track from the top level
menu?  Both of these are de facto features on popular players (Banshee,
amarok and Mediamonkey on Windows) and contribute to usability. 


> > I have been silent on the update manager issue in the hopes that a sane
> > solution would present itself.  It hasn't.  Now you are forcing our
> > hand. So I submit.  What do you intend to do to resolve that fact that
> > the update manager pops down on the desktop like the old X-10 web ads
> > that we all utterly despised? :/
> >...
> 
> Primarily, simplifying the alert.
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareUpdateHandling#alert>

But you are still talking about interrupting work flow or confusing the
user with a with a pop-down that they didn't initiate.  Simplifying the
dialog doesn't solve the problem.  The asynchronous nature of the dialog
is the crux of the problem.

Plus, as I pointed out several months ago, this is a HUGE security hole.
Passwords should only be given in response to a user initiated
operation.  Asynchronous dialogs that ask for passwords are a very bad
precedent for a secure O/S.


> Secondarily, working on ways to reduce its frequency without
> compromising security. One example is increasing the proportion of
> people who download updates in the background and install them at
> shutdown. Another is prompting people to install any pending updates at
> the same time as they install an application in Ubuntu Software Center.

Why is this secondary?  Why don't you configure the update process to
download the updates and provide an install option at shutdown or
restart by default.  This will fix the problem once and for all.  That's
where it logically belongs as reboots are necessarily part of the
process in many cases. It's synchronous as it is initiated by the user
attempt to change the state of the system.