JobViewServer specification proposal

[Florent Mertens]

Hi Aaron and Rafael,

I'll not reply point by point, because i think that we don't really have 
the same point of view on how things should works.

If i understand correctly, you idea is to get ride of all progress bar 
of all applications and to have a common application for controlling 
this progress. This sound cool, but i don't think that this is the right 
approch, i'll do my best to explain why.

Let's take some real uses cases :

Take a download application. This can be a p2p application, a torrent 
application, or whatever you want. There point is to download stuff, so 
one of there first feature is to show the progress of this downloading, 
and to be able to control it. This can be by setting priority, limiting 
bandwirth, showing fine detail of the progress (torrent are hashed)...
So whatever you might think, you can't get ride of the progress bar in 
those applications. Point taken, you can also provide those infos to the 
JobView, so you can have a look at what's going on quickly. But there 
will be some redundancy there. You have 2 open window with the same 
information, but one with finer grain informations. Guess which one 
you'll look at.

Now take a file manager. Most of the time when you copy stuff it takes 
less than 1 min. So the progress window only shoot up for a small amount 
of time. If each time you copy some files appear a window with a lot of 
different jobs that have nothing to do with what you are currently 
doing, this is not really the better way to communicate this 
information. And you can multiply the uses cases, when you do something 
that require a progress window, you don't always want to have the all 
view of what's going on. You just want to know how is going what you are 
  currently doing.

If i was interested by this spec in the first place, it was because i 
have a net idea of how things should works. This is my own opinion, and 
i might have failed in thinking what users want.

For the reasons i stated above, i don't think that it is a good idea to 
get ride of application's progress window. But it is important to be 
able to have an overview of what's going on, and this is why this spec 
is important. This JobView window should reside in the system tray. The 
problem is that if you keep all those progress window and you add an 
other one that show the overview, you don't really solve the problem. So 
a solution might be to provide an hide/unhide facility. You should be 
able to hide your application's progress bar, and unhide it via the 
JobView window.

Exemple :
A progress bar appear when you are copying some files. You have a hide 
button. When you click on it you have a little animation that show you 
that it's hide in a The JobView tray icon. If you click on this tray 
icon, you have an overview of all the long time job, including the job 
you just hide. It provide an unhide button, which when clicked pop up 
the application progress bar.

This solution allow the user to have the control on what level of 
information he want, If he want to only see the progress of what he is 
currently doing, or if he prefer having an overview.

I hope you'll understand my concerns. But i also be entirely wrong, and 
if so, please convince me that i am wrong.

Best regards,

Flo