[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Progress indicator

[Heiko Tietze]

Am Dienstag, 9. Juli 2013, 22:04:56 schrieb Thomas Pfeiffer:
>> * Show progress regarding contentual steps.
>I don't think the word "contentual" exists. What did you mean?
Download of two files, one 1GB the other 1kB: don't show #files but #kB.

>> * Don't use waiting bars (aka marquee style).
>I'm not sure what you mean by "waiting bar". You mean the one that looks like 
>a progress bar but just continuously moves to show that the application does 
>not know when it's finished?
Yes. Left - right, right - left. It's IMHO just a simple animation.

>I agree that those are bad for the user experience, but we need to suggest an 
>alternative for when we can't really tell the progress because we don't know 
>the overall amount of work yet (i think vastly inaccurate progress bars are 
>even worse than "waiting bars").
>Do you know a better way to visualize an indefinite busy state?
I would demand to know the total progress. But if really necessary, a busy 
pointer (aka spinning wheel) is okay. An example: you connect to a site to 
download the two file mentioned above. The time until handshake is done depends 
on #prism and other unknown delayers, so it's neccessary to indicate that we 
wait (and still hope for a connection). But it's better to run the download in 
background which makes progress indication dispensable.