unity-design team mailing list archive

[Toni Ruottu <toni.ruottu@xxxxxx>]

I see. I haven't been using compiz, as some of the effects seem
distracting. The alt+tab visualization was the killer iirc, as it
slowed down jumping between windows. I also do not have the required
computational power on all of my systems, and I occasionally needed
some features from Xmonad. Jumping between Metacity and Xmonad seemed
to work better, than jumping between Compiz and Xmonad. I don't think
any of these inconveniences was on purpose, and I see no reason why
they wouldn't get fixed as hardware and software mature.

I think graying out the window is already quite good. Despite not
using compiz every day, I've seen this happen. I just want to point
out that the jam windicator would not only show jamming, but make the
process specific section of gnome-system-manager irrelevant. There may
also be other similar functionalities like bandwidth limitations,
which are similar.

It may be useful to recognize that the jam windicator would not make
the whole gnome-system-manager obsolete, as it also show system wide
information. What should be done with rest of the functionalities,
remains open for discussion. The system wide graphs help user to find
the bottle neck of the system. I'm not sure this is something normal
users are expected to do.

Currently gnome-system-manager has four tabs, and I'm not sure if any
of these actually belong together. The system tab represents usefull
information about the system, but I doubt this is the place where
users would look to find such information. The second tab shows stuff
that might be better served by windicators, as it is all application
specific information. Ofcourse the tableview allows one to order by
column to find resource hogs, so that might be something worth
keeping. The resource tab is clearly useful and should be kept in some
form. I do wonder, why it is lacking a load graph. Finally, the file
systems tab shows some usefull information about disks, but again I
wonder if this is the place where users look for that kind of
information. We also have a "Disk Utility". That seems like a better
place for this kind of information.

  --Toni

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 3:57 AM, Frederik Nnaji
<frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Toni ;)
>
> On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 10:54, Toni Ruottu <toni.ruottu@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>  hello
>>
>> Excuse me for not following the windicator discussion earlier too
>> closely. I just read about the planned categories, and wanted to point
>> out that the list is lacking a resource consumption management
>> category, or jam windicator as I'd call it. The icon should show
>> whether or not the relevant process is causing the system to jam at
>> the moment. Displaying this information would help user learn which
>> processes are the top resource hogs on their system.
>>
>> The menu of the jam windicator should show more specific information,
>> such as memory consumption, processor and network usage. It should
>> ideally also let the user set application priority and set bandwidth
>> limits for the software. It is currently possible to set priority in
>> gnome system monitor. It also displays some resource consumption
>> information, but it may be hard for an average user to correlate this
>> with the applications. An example of bandwidth limiting can currently
>> be found in Transmission, which has a "turtle button" for slowing down
>> the downloads.
>
> "frozen" applications turn their windows grey/passive in Compiz.
> perhaps a Windicator can augment this feature..
>