unity-design team mailing list archive

[Chris Coulson <chrisccoulson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Today I created a small extension to integrate Firefox in to the Unity
launcher [1]. So far, all it does is indicate download progress in the
launcher. Apart from that, it doesn't really have any clear direction
and I'm not sure what else I'm going to do with it just yet (I hacked on
it because I wanted to play around with the launcher API and jsctypes
before UDS, and I'd appreciate some design input before I do anything
else with it). However, I noticed some limitations with the current
launcher implementation and I'm not sure whether I'm just using it for
the wrong things or whether they are genuine design issues:

1) It's not obvious what the progress bar on the Firefox icon actually
indicates. I know it's download progress because I wrote the extension,
but Firefox has ways of indicating progress for many other things too -
eg, is it indicating page load, addon install or bookmark sync progress?

2) Considering point 1, should I limit the use of the progress bar to
just indicating download progress, or should I use it for indicating the
progress of other tasks too?

3) Because the launcher (and hence the progressbar) is hidden by
default, I'm not sure whether I need to support additional (and legacy)
methods for indicating progress of a task. Eg, Firefox normally opens a
download progress window when starting a download. Ideally, I would like
to not present that window at all when running in Unity (except for
accessing finished downloads), and just rely on the launcher instead.
However, with the progressbar hidden by default, I'm not sure that this
is a good idea.

4) If I pause all my downloads, should I continue to show the
progressbar or should I hide it? Should there be a way to indicate that
the job has been paused? (looking at the Firefox code suggests the
Windows launcher provides a way to indicate that a job is paused,
although I don't have a Windows install to verify this).

5) If I open multiple instances of Firefox, they will all try to
indicate progress through the same launcher icon.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Chris

[1] - https://launchpad.net/unityfox

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