unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've done a really basic mockup at [1] - I'm not much of a graphics artist,
but hopefully it'll get the concept across.

The use case I see for this feature is basically the same use case that the
regular launcher-progressbar fills. When you have an application that's
doing something, it's nice to be able to see that at a glance, without
opening up the full interface. Whether the action has a calculable amount
complete or not is really irrelevant to the use case.

It's probably also worth noting that Windows 7 does something similar -
when an application is doing an action with a normal progress bar, its tile
fills with green. When the progress is indeterminate, its tile sort of
strobes green - it's a bit of an odd effect, but it fulfills the use case I
mentioned above.

Evan

[1] http://dl.dropbox.com/u/171647/Unity_Launcher_Busy_Mockup.png

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 2:04 AM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> It might be worth exploring the use of a spinny in the space we place
> numbers, but not a progress bar. Mockups welcome.
>
>
> On 28/02/12 05:59, Ian Santopietro wrote:
>
> In cases where there is no determined percentage or time remaining, I
> don't feel it would be appropriate to show a progress bar there at all.
> Indeterminate progress bars are great for a particular window for
> indicating that _something_ is happening, but I don't think this behavior
> is appropriate for the launcher.
> On Feb 27, 2012 8:12 PM, "Evan Huus" <eapache@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
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>
>
>