Re: [Usability] online/offline design

[Brian Skahan <bskahan etria com>]

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 20:36 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> I was, uh, trying to be a bit less grand in scope :) Obviously it
> would be nice to catch some of these things and think through them,
> but I'm more concerned with the concrete-and-fixable-RIGHT-NOW issue,
> which is 'we have a way to tell if a machine is online/offline, and we
> have many apps which should fail gracefully if they are offline. What
> should they say when they fail?' So, uh, any suggestions? :)

I think Gossip's offline dialog is a perfect example of how far you can go with a standard dialog for the right-now issue:

I'm paraphrasing but:

+---------------------+
| **Connection lost** |
|                     |
| [ignore] [reconnect]|
+---------------------+

It's not really gossip's job to deal with why I'm offline, it just need to go on/offline smartly.

That said, gossip's dialog is excruciatingly annoying.  When I start gossip/evolution/epiphany and I'm online, I expect them to go online and stay that way until I tell them not to.  If something happens to the network, I'd like to know but I don't want to be interrupted, and I don't need every application telling me at the same time.  Whatever programs went offline should just go back online when there is a network.

Evolution is in the best position to handle this smartly, with the little connection icon in the corner.  No desktop application should pop-up a dialog to tell me about the network, the network manager should do that.

-Brian

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