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

Rob Scheepmaker r.scheepmaker at student.utwente.nl
Fri Nov 28 14:00:34 CET 2008


On Thursday 27 November 2008 23:59:16 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Getting used to it, I'm encountering some behavioural problems, I'll list
> them here:

I agree that some polish is required to improve uiserver's usability. I'm 
willing to work on improving this: a lot can be accomplished with very few 
lines of code. The major issue is: what behavior is actually useful for as 
many people as possible. For 4.3 we can add some configuration options, but 
until then, we need some sensible defaults. Here's what I think sane behavior 
would be:

* 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.
* 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.
* Some more info should be added. I'm thinking of adding 3 labels (all on one 
line), to display totalSize, processedSize (both in Kb/Mb/Gb, not in files), 
and current speed. All that information is provided by the dataengine, and 
doesn't require any new strings, so I think it should be ok.

In the end, I'd love to see detaching to windows in 4.3, and some other 
features too (opening the file/directly for example), but I think we'll have 
quite sensible behavior with these 3 points implemented, and people that still 
don't like it can change the behavior in the config file with Andras' patch.

Regards,
Rob


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