uiserver interaction, was: Re: [PATCH] Show the job progress in separate dialog

[Rob Scheepmaker]

On Friday 28 November 2008 18:18:05 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 28 November 2008, Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
> > * By default, don't automatically hide the popup, when it shows a running
> > job. They're passive popups now (nice btw :)), which mean they aren't
> > very intrusive anyways, and you can always close the popup with the right
> > icon (which I notice now has a different background... smart little
> > improvement, makes it clearer that somehow, that icon is special). Of
> > course you can now always reopen the popup after it is hidden, but I
> > think this automatic hiding could confuse some users ("where did my job
> > go?").  The only way the popup should automatically be hidden, is
> > whenever the extender becomes empty.
>
> i'm not sure i agree; i don't need something chugging away for minutes at a
> time on my screen just because it's working in the background.
>
> it should:
>
> * tell me when it starts
> * let me see what's going on when i wish to
> * let me ignore it when i wish to (which means defaulting to being
> unobtrusive)
> * tell me when it's finished or stopped due to an error

I usually prefer being able to keep an eye on it. But of course people's 
opinion on what is best can differ widely.
While a ui option for configuring this behavior is no longer possible, we 
could at least add a config option for this so people can change this behavior 
in their appletrc. jobPopupDuration=<time in s> where 0 means 'keep open until 
finished'. We can later always decide what would be an appropriate default, 
maybe after discussing this with the usability people.

> > * Completed transfers should not directly be destroyed. Ideally, we
> > have a checkbox like the oldschool dialogs... "keep visible after job is
> > complete", or something to that extend. But considering string freeze and
> > whatnot, I think sensible behavior might be a timeout
> > (extenderItem->setAutoExpireDelay), of 5-10 seconds or something like
> > that. Always keeping it doesn't sound like a good idea to me, since that
> > requires the user to manually close every transfer window after each
> > transfer which can grow tiresome. By keeping it 10 seconds, and showing
> > the popup the moment a job finishes (if it isn't shown already), users
> > can be quite clearly informed that their job is ready.
>
> if they collapse down to a smaller size, have an "Open" button and a global
> "clear" button it should work. not unlike the Firefox download overview
> really.

Hmm, this amount of feature completeness sounds more like a 4.3 thing, imo. I 
like the idea though.

Regards,
Rob