[Nepomuk] Nepomuk Controller

Vishesh Handa me at vhanda.in
Thu May 2 17:02:14 UTC 2013


Hey Jorg

I was taking a look at the new nepomuk controller which you designed. I 
ideally wanted to remove the old nepomuk controller in favour for this 
qml based on, but it lacks certain features.

The old controller just solves the following purpose for file indexing -

1. Quick Overview - You can quickly see if something is being indexed by 
looking for the icon in the status bar.

2. Detailed Information - You can see which file is currently being 
indexed, and hope many files have been indexed in total.

3. Control - You can suspend / resume the indexing and launch 
additional settings to configure the indexing.

-----

The new controller needs to solve these criteria for all kinds of indexing. 
Not just files. So we need the following use cases to be satisfied -

1. Quick Overview - Quickly see if something is being indexed
2. Detailed Information - Which file/email/contact? Progress %?
3. Pause/Resume indexing - (Optional - suspend/resume only some 
types of indexing - but I personally think the user shouldn't have to care 
that much)

And finally, it should provide information about "File Metadata update" 
operations when the file metadata is being updated after a large file 
move.

The new controller solves (2) and (3) to a certain extent, though I feel 
it's too technical. The user shouldn't have to care about each service. 
That's just an implementation detail.

In order to solve (1) the following needs to be implemented - 

a. The widget should only be active on the system tray when Nepomuk 
is doing some activity which might bother the user so we might want to 
inform this. This typically means that whenever anything consumes the 
system resources for a noticeable amount of time, the widget should 
appear on the system tray.
	
The old Nepomuk controller used to only become active if there was 
activity for more than 2 seconds. In our new one maybe we should keep 
it to about 10 seconds?

b. Easily know what's going on - This should ideally be done via a 
system popup when hovering over the widget. Something simple like 
"Files and Emails are currently being indexed"

-----

(2) and (3) are partly solved, but it's just too technical right now. I've 
made some mockups which I think would be better.

See the attached image

This clearly shows what is being indexed and even gives a kind of 
progress meter which the user can consult if they are interested. 
Though it just occurred to me that maybe there should be a global 
progress bar as well?

Please note that the "Indexing Emails/Files/Blah" will only be shown when 
something is being indexed. Otherwise it will be blank.

One case which I haven't mentioned is that of the file watcher, I'm not 
sure how to represent that, but we do need to show a message that 
metadata is being updated to reflect the state of the File System.

Opinions? Comments?

PS : We could add the web-miner as "Fetching additional data about <fileName>" 
and maybe we could even show some cool icon like a relevant picture. For 
example say the banner of lost when fetching information about a lost episode.
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