Allow me to also suggest that we fix all those progress messages, that appear at the start and end of pretty much any Yast setup tool. They may not pop-up a window, but they are just as annoying and confusing, as they appear and disappear in an instance. I suggest to only show progress information after a few seconds, avoiding the appear/disappear effect. For the step-based progress info, if it is of any importance, have a "Continue" button that the user presses after he reads them. We could have a Yast module for this. I would suggest to make it frontend implementable, so we can adapt it to the Gnome HIG (which specified the presentation of progress information). Cheers, Ricardo Ter, 2007-05-15 às 00:18 +1000, Mohammad Bhuyan escreveu:

First of all, a separate window for expressing "progress" of an operation is seems to be going against some UI philosophy. My idea of poping up an window/message box is the case of:

1. A feedback form user is needed. Usually Ok, Cancel, Discard etc. 2. An error notification

If you see carefully both of this situation would need to grab user attention even if the user is busy with some other app.

whereas a "progress bar" is something is of showing the status of the operation user has initiated and mostly by default user will expect it to finish. In this case I guess the best choice is to incorporate the progress notification in the same window/UI space where user initiated the operation. (For example, in the case of Installation Source, the progress bars could easily be placed in the main windows itself, even better as a list column to show the message on top of progress bar. This would also make it possible to make the refresh of repositories multi-threaded and show the progress all of all of them at the same time)

Also about the sentence used in messages,

How does a message like "Applying Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski algorithm" tell you? What if I say "Compressing data?". (Ok the example will not work if you know data compression stuffs.) Sometimes to much details are really unnecessary.

Again I will go with a Windows example that I like. Did you notice that stupid OS whenever turned on will go on for hours slowing down your box to death with only a icon in the system tray saying "Downloading updates X%". That's all it says but I am sure behind they are replacing all their system DLLs. It never says me "Downloading ntx32-64.dll..." "Executing regsrv32 ntx32-64.DLL ... " blah blah. Mostly an end used will do not want to know such things, These don't make any sense to them.

For the Experts, it would be enough to create and save a log somewhere in the system about all the details that's been done in the update.

I hope you see what I mean. I guess "Please wait while files are being downloaded" or something along in that line could make a non-techie feel at home.

Regards,

Mohammad

On 5/14/07, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

...

On Sunday 13 May 2007 03:50:21 pm Mohammad Bhuyan wrote:

...

For example : Explain me how flashing 20/30 progress bar with downlaoding../parsing... messages help while I am adding installation source. As a engineer I can see clearly its a "developer testing" code that helps to see if download/parsing is going OK. How a end user will benefit from this messages. Also that flashing is annoying enough to nuke the programmers den.

Aaha, I can tell you about this!

Before those downloading/parsing progress windows were added, there was nothing. This "nothing" would take a lot of time, during which time the application was busy with that downloading and parsing that is now shown. What was the result of nothing shown? 80% of users thought that something is worng and killed the window, the process etc and started it all over again. Also a lot complained that it's taking too long, suse sucks and such.

Now with those progress windows, users see that something is indeed going on, even if it looks like nonsense to most of them. And people understand that if downloading stuff off the net takes long it's not the fault of the distribution.

This does not change the fact that it's still taking too long :-) but at least it offers an explanation and a diversion to the user.

So, it's a good thing.

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Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

Absolutely, the way windows pop-up and disappear in YaST update is annoying. Having established that we need a progress indicator and that it needs to be in the same window, the question is can it be done easily?

Actually we already have a Progress module in YaST that draws those "nice" full-screen progress dialogs but not everything can be solved this way especially when one YaST module calls another modules. You might already see some improvement, for instance, in the latest 10.3 alpha when initializing the installation environment and probing the system. There used to be several pop-up windows but now, there is only one progress dialog. ---------------------------------- :: Probing System :: [x] Probing disk controllers... [x] Loading drivers... [->] Probing disks... [ ] Search for partitions [==========75%===>_____] ---------------------------------- Of course, the detail-level of presented information is unclear because the target customer might be either newbie or an experienced hacker. If you are trying to discuss what should be shown and how, please, stop to think about the target users, what they expect and whether (if we present only the most important information) we could somehow show more information on request (show details, or a "|>" icon known to GTK+ users). And of course, if you want to change how the entire YaST behaves, write also to the yast-devel@opensuse.org mailing-list ;) Thanks Lukas -- Lukas Ocilka, YaST Developer (xn--luk-gla45d) ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s. r. o., Lihovarska 1060/12, Praha 9, Czech Republic