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

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 30 November 2008, Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
> 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.

are we sure that's the right granularity? that it's really what people need?
(versus what they claim to want)

i probably really, really don't care that my DVD is 15%, oh, now 16%, oh now 
17% done. i just want to be told "it's done". i might care that the download 
that is going to take 00:02:36 is half done, however. i don't want to watch 
the progress on that other download that's going to take 02:36:00 however; i 
just want to check it every so often and be told when it fails.

there is no "time in seconds" that cover these situations because it isn't 
about how long; it's about:

* the context (file copies are probably more interesting to watch than DVD 
burning or molecule folding or ...)

* the total length (a two minute task might result in me waiting for it, but i 
probably won't wait for a two hour task)

a tooltip that one can use to get a snapshot of progress might also be useful 
(like how the clock uses it to show timezone information)

and remember, once we offer a feature it's really, really hard to take back. 
that and we face the distros "backporting" it against our will if we do. 

(i wonder if the distros ever stop and think just how much they are damaging 
the trust of upstreams with their behaviour?)

> > 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.

agreed

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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