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

Sebastian Kügler sebas at kde.org
Sat Nov 29 04:37:05 CET 2008


On Friday 28 November 2008 14:00:34 Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
> 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.

I think all of those items are useful and get us further in that direction. 
I'd be interested to try it with your proposed changes.

The "keep open" could maybe even be solved with some kind of "pinning" icon.

Something else that struck me is that often jobs that only run very shortly 
are shown, they usually pop up with a 100% filled progress bar and vanish 
after a timeout. I think the "old" behaviour had some kind of minimal amount 
of time a job needs to take, and it wouldn't show the progress bar when, for 
example opening a webpage in konqi from another app.

> 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.

Yep.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 

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