genesis-devs team mailing list archive

[Frederik Elwert <frederik.elwert@xxxxxx>]

Hi David,

Am Mittwoch, den 02.12.2009, 22:29 +0100 schrieb David Castellanos: 
> 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?

Yes, I think that is the way to go. I just couldn’t check your proposed
icon because I couldn’t find that branch.

> 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.

Yes, I would almost agree. I just thought that at step 5, the error icon
remains until the error log has been viewed by clicking on the icon
(4.1). This would reset the icon and the click action.

> About the 4th step, almost prefer the second option. Maybe it isn't so
> clear that the tray-icon behaviour has changed.

I would prefer to use the icon as to show the log in case of an error.
The tooltip should contain the information about the current action
("Synchronization failed. Click to check the error log.").

> What about to add a
> 'Show log' action to the tray-icon pop-up menu?,

I think it would be useful to have this entry in the pop-up menu,
anyway. This would allow to check the log even if no error occurred.
When doing that, we should probably also switch to showing the real
syncevolution log instead of just grabbing stdout/stderr. The bit tricky
part on this is that the location of the log changes depending on the
configuration. But I think it should be possible to find out the current
location of the log file.

> 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.

You mean to update the log while it is displayed? Hm, I’m not sure how
difficult this is, but we could try.

For the changed icon, I already had a new notification system for
Genesis in mind. It should be an abstraction to the current direct calls
to pynotifiy: Instead of directly triggering a notification, we should
call our own abstract notification mechanism. This would then:

     1. Display the libnotify notification 
     2. Set the status icon 
     3. Add an action if necessary

Currently, there is a hacky check to see if any accounts have been
configured. If not, clicking the icon calls the Account Assistant
instead of performing a sync. This should then also be converted to the
new notification mechanism.

I think I’ll work out a proposal how I think such a system could work,
and then discuss this with you.

Cheers,
Frederik