unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

At the moment, the Unity Launcher supports displaying the progress of an
application as part of its launcher tile. This is good.

Some tasks in some applications, however, do not have an easily calculated
percentage completion, and so use an 'indeterminate progress bar'. A good
example of this is when checking for new updates in Update Manager. The
progress bar bounces back and forth, rather than filling from start to
finish.

Problem: The Unity launcher has no support for displaying this type of
status on a launcher tile.

I think it would be useful if applications could indicate to Unity that
they were performing an indeterminate-progress action, and that Unity would
then indicate this on the launcher tile somehow. I think a spinner would be
better than the bouncing-progress-bar because of the amount of detail
available in a small launcher tile, but that's obviously debatable.

Thoughts? UI-Freeze is past for Precise already, but this seems like it
would be relatively simple (basically just 'start' and 'stop' API calls and
the actual rendering)...

Evan