genesis-devs team mailing list archive

[David Castellanos <davidcaste@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Frederik!

I should have sent an email long ago, but I've been a little busy and
I've delayed it until now.

I've thought about you talk about removing the action from the
notification when an error happens, because the new Ubuntu
notification system doesn't support it. When an error happens, the
user is advised with a notification, but when that notification
expires, the user doesn't have a way to know that something was wrong.
Other programs, such as Ubuntu One, inform the user of the error by an
error icon in the tray-icon. I believe we could serve us as well, and
I created some error icons that can serve. I've uploaded them to
lp:~davidcaste/genesis-sync/refactored-humanity-icons, could you take
a look and comment what you think about them?

So, the scenario could be the following:
1. A synchronization is initiated (automatically, or requested by the user)
2. The synchronization fails for some reason.
3. Genesis shows a notification with the error reason, and changes its
tray-icon with the error one. The tray tooltip might show something
like "Account XXX synchronization failed".
4. The user acknowledges the error, and (1) he clicks in the tray-icon
and the 'Show log' dialog appears or (2) he choose the action 'Show
log' from the tray-icon pop-up menu.
5. The error icon remains until there is a valid/not failed synchronization.

About the 4th step, almost prefer the second option. Maybe it isn't so
clear that the tray-icon behaviour has changed. What about to add a
'Show log' action to the tray-icon pop-up menu?, how difficult would
be to display the contents of the file genesis.log at real-time in the
'show log' dialog? This way the user could easily know what has gone
wrong with his account synchronization, and Genesis would provide a
very interesting feedback.

Cheers!!! :-)


2009/11/25 Frederik Elwert <frederik.elwert@xxxxxx>:
> Am Mittwoch, den 25.11.2009, 10:02 +0100 schrieb David Castellanos:
>> The main newness of my proposal is the genesis-idle icon, which
>> instead of show a curved arrow shows a circumference. This way I think
>> differentiates better between idle and in-sync status. With
>> Imagemagick's convert program I've a quick and dirty gif animation,
>> but is to much pixelated (damn gif format...). This new icons are
>> available in lp:~davidcaste/genesis-sync/refactored-humanity-icons.
>> What do you think about them?
>
> I generally like your approach. The thinner line looks nice, and
> probably its indeed better to use a solid color for the pipe instead of
> a gradient.
>
> I also think that the circle for the idle icon looks good and is a good
> idea. But what I liked about the arrow is that it can be read as a "G".
> So it is not only a generic symbol, but also fits to "Genesis". But I
> don’t know if many people do actually realise that (I didn’t, my
> girlfried had to show me ;-)). So the abstract circle might be a good
> choice.
>
> I’ll officially release Genesis 0.4.2 today (the karmic package is
> already built), so we have enough time to think about this before the
> next release.
>
> Cheers,
> Frederik
>
>