Icon in notification area

[Ted Gould]

The client seems to put an icon in my notification area, and sit there, and do nothing, but be annoying. There seems to be no way to turn this off. There is no reason I need the icon there. Please take it away.

Also, it seems sometimes it's a spinner, I'm not sure why I need that either. The spinner doesn't give me any real information, the information I care about is whether a specific file is uploaded, not if all files are uploaded or syncing or whatever. Spinner should go too.

If there's something I need to react to, pop up a dialog. If there's informational stuff, throw up a notification. But the icon is just silly.

[Joshua Blount (jblount)]

Thanks for the bug report!

Right now, one of the major ways a user can interact with the service is via the icon in the notification area. From there the user can do the following:

1. Quit the daemon
2. Connect / Disconnect
3. Go to a webpage to report a bugt
4. Open their Ubuntu One folder in the file manager
5. Go to the files UI on http://ubuntuone.com

It's presence also serves as a visual reminder of the service, which is quite transparent to the user, so it may be helpful to have a cue to help remind you to take advantage of Ubuntu One.

So it does provide a bit more functionality than just the 'annoy users' feature :)

The spinner currently communicates the transition process (between being disconnected, to being connected), but I agree there may be a better way to communicate that. Could you go into detail by what you consider 'real information' ? I think the state between connection and disconnection is something valuable to communicate to our users.

Perhaps a preference to show / hide the icon in the notification area would go a long way to serve your use case? Can you confirm this?

[Elliot Murphy (statik)]

Yo Ted! I would love to hash out a new design that allows getting rid of this applet/icon thingy, hopefully you can help with that. We can leave this bug report open, but lets set up a call next week with you and a couple of the folks on the U1 team to get started on the next generation design. I'll contact you separately to set it up.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 20:44 +0000, Joshua Blount wrote:
> 1. Quit the daemon

I guess it seems like this should be a setting in preferences. Turn on
Ubuntu One, turn off Ubuntu One.

> 2. Connect / Disconnect

Isn't this what the network manager icon is for? Why would I want to
turn off Ubuntu One independent of my network settings?

> 3. Go to a webpage to report a bug

It would seem unlikely that I'd want to do this while running another
application or doing another task. I see no reason to add an icon to
provide this while running.

> 4. Open their Ubuntu One folder in the file manager

Isn't that what Places->Ubuntu One is for?

> 5. Go to the files UI on http://ubuntuone.com

Is there something I can do there that I can't do in Places->Ubuntu One?

> It's presence also serves as a visual reminder of the service, which is
> quite transparent to the user, so it may be helpful to have a cue to
> help remind you to take advantage of Ubuntu One.

Marketing is never a good reason to clutter the user's desktop. Just
like I don't need a Logitech icon to know what brand my mouse is on
Windows. If users don't think to use the service it isn't useful
enough :)

> The spinner currently communicates the transition process (between being
> disconnected, to being connected), but I agree there may be a better way
> to communicate that. Could you go into detail by what you consider 'real
> information' ? I think the state between connection and disconnection is
> something valuable to communicate to our users.

Again, I don't see any reason why connected/disconnected wouldn't be
exactly the same as my networking settings. But it seems like that
information could be displayed as a notification. It's okay if you miss
it, and I don't really need to know that it's happening.

> Perhaps a preference to show / hide the icon in the notification area
> would go a long way to serve your use case? Can you confirm this?

No. Preferences for bad ideas don't make them good ideas :) It's more
important to look at the information that needs to be communicated and
come up with a really good way to get that to the users. Preferences
just cause confusion and documentation nightmares.

[Elliot Murphy (statik)]

On 04/16/2009 05:25 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
>> 2. Connect / Disconnect
>
> Isn't this what the network manager icon is for? Why would I want to
> turn off Ubuntu One independent of my network settings?
>

This is the only one I think we have a strong defense for - when I pop
open my netbook on a tiny little mobile phone tethered internet
connection to send an important email, I don't really want Ubuntu One
using all the bandwidth to sync down the 20 new screenshots that my
colleague has dropped into our shared folder.

I wonder how/where to easily let people enable/disable U1 syncing (which
is really a simplified case of people needing to choose between
different syncing policies depending on where they are connected from).

--
Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/

[Ted Gould (ted)]

On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 21:40 +0000, Elliot Murphy wrote:
> On 04/16/2009 05:25 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
> >> 2. Connect / Disconnect
> >
> > Isn't this what the network manager icon is for? Why would I want to
> > turn off Ubuntu One independent of my network settings?
>
> This is the only one I think we have a strong defense for - when I pop
> open my netbook on a tiny little mobile phone tethered internet
> connection to send an important email, I don't really want Ubuntu One
> using all the bandwidth to sync down the 20 new screenshots that my
> colleague has dropped into our shared folder.
>
> I wonder how/where to easily let people enable/disable U1 syncing (which
> is really a simplified case of people needing to choose between
> different syncing policies depending on where they are connected from).

I guess this depends on two things. One, how important the data is, and
two the speed of the connection. If you checked your e-mail quickly and
it turns out your colleague made some last minute updates to the
presentation you're about to give, you'd pretty excited to know you
caught those. It seems like you should, in any case get a notification
of "There are 23 updates available, blocking download because you're on
3G" and provide a way to check for, and download individual files.

I don't think even in the low bandwidth quick check e-mail case you want
U1 off, you just want it not to auto-download files. Right?

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 22:03 +0000, Ted Gould wrote:
>
> I guess this depends on two things. One, how important the data is,
> and
> two the speed of the connection.

Welcome to Australia.

"I guess this depends on N things. How much of my life savings will be
spent if I sync stuff on mobile internet. Do I have enough bandwidth to
do syncing at all. And how important is the data."

-Rob

[Ted Gould (ted)]

On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 23:05 +0000, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 22:03 +0000, Ted Gould wrote:
> >
> > I guess this depends on two things. One, how important the data is,
> > and
> > two the speed of the connection.
>
> Welcome to Australia.

That's entirely unfair. Software can't be expected to work right in
Australia too! Australia is a scary place best left to Australians. :)

Though, it seems like type of connection would be a useful setting. For
instance that's how the iPhone looks at things. Well, I guess three
states. It does WiFi, data cellular, and then data cellular roaming.
Which kinda combines them to: "Fast Internet", "Slow Internet," and
"Non-fixed rate Internet."

[Rick McBride (rmcbride)]

Not sure what's to be done about this, but I am sure it doesn't belong in the "New" queue at this point ;)

[Elliot Murphy (statik)]

Here is the plan after UDS:
1) Connect/Disconnect to be moved into the presence indicator (the green dot thingy that lets you say whether you are online or offline).
2) Sharing invitations can be handled via the messaging indicator
3) upload/download status to be reported in the upcoming "downloads" indicator that the design team is working on for karmic.

Separately from this bug report about the applet, I think we need a settings dialog for U1 in Settings->Preferences. And, the nautilus plugin is getting split out into a separate package and being rewritten in C.

The applet may optionally be kept around if it is useful for developers, but it will not shown by default.

[Niels Egberts (nielsegberts)]

Those are great ideas! But what is the reason of rewriting the nautilus plugin in C?

[dobey (dobey)]

On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 20:36 +0000, Niels Egberts wrote:
> Those are great ideas! But what is the reason of rewriting the nautilus
> plugin in C?

There are some issues in python-dbus it appears, which can occasionally
cause nautilus to crash, and python-nautilus is not in main. Rewriting
in C lets us remove both of these dependencies from the extension,
preventing the crashes, and avoiding requiring more space on the CD. So
in short, rewriting it in C will help us kill several birds with one
stone, and we'll be much closer to being in main and on the CD for
Karmic.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Yeah, I think the nautilus extension is an elegant place for some of these actions as well since it is context aware. If update manager can't even get a spot in the notification area, I don't think Ubuntu One needs one either ;)

[dobey (dobey)]

Actually, update-manager does indeed have a tray icon still. It is just
disabled by default, as you don't really need to see updates all the
time, unless you're running a development release, or there are security
updates. And the default behavior when there are security updates is to
just open and let you push "Update".

Such a design doesn't really fit well with something like a
synchronization service, where you might not want to sync down the 2GB
of photos someone shared with you, while you're on a GPRS connection in
South America or something similar where doing so may cost you a
significant amount of money.

The applet isn't a permanent solution. It's a temporary salve to provide
the user with a way to access certain functionality until we are stable
and have more features implemented to deal with things like Mobile
Broadband connections more automatically.

On Thu, 2009-06-04 at 15:22 +0000, Michael Rooney wrote:
> Yeah, I think the nautilus extension is an elegant place for some of
> these actions as well since it is context aware. If update manager can't
> even get a spot in the notification area, I don't think Ubuntu One needs
> one either ;)
>

[Elliot Murphy (statik)]

This has been resolved after hundreds of man-years of discussion, so marking as fix-released.