[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Progress indicator

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 09 July 2013 22:40:41 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> 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.

Then I think "content-specific" is the correct word.
 
> >> * 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.

Yes, makes sense. I'd then wrote
"Don't use progress bars if the time needed to complete the task cannot be 
estimated. In that case, if the task will likely take only a few seconds, use 
a spinner. If it takes longer, move the task to the background"