GUI Mockups

[Alexandre <airmind gmail com>]

Hi,

I've been thinking for a while about how to improve the Conduit user interface, especially how to improve experience with removable devices, such as iPods (part of my Google Summer of Code project actually). As I got to think about that, it became clear to me that the Conduit experience could be much improved if it based on things to sync, like devices, applications or online services. The user dont think about dataproviders and conduits or about connecting one datasource to a datasink to sync his files. He wants his cell-phone or iPod to be in sync with his desktop or online data. Or he wants his desktop data to be in sync with an online service.
After thinking about it for a while, I came to what I think could be a good solution, and made some mockups to feel how it would work. These are what I came up with:









These explain most of what I've been thinking. There is an alternative way to do the last one, with the Home tab, in which instead of each category separately, we can show the third pane directly.
One thing to notice here however, is that the Music, Video and Pictures tabs of Home are not only decorative, they filter their input data to only let their desired types to come in, and provide some functionality, such as separating Music files by their artists and albums, etc. And I would like to have the same thing with the removable drives. Dataproviders for removable drives would be very close to what the Folder dataprovider currently is, but it would not let the user change the root directory (which would be the removable drive directory), but instead only choose a sub-directory of the drive.
Another thing I think would be nice, is a baloon notification when a device supported by Conduit is inserted, which jumps to that device tab when the notification is clicked.

Well, this kind of interface is especially for what I did the new configuration system. See how the configuration is embed in the window. The user just follows the flow, he selects what he wants to sync, adds to what he wants to sync, and immediately configures what he just selected.
Most of it is easily implemented with the current architecture, but one idea I had was to use the DBus interface to this, so that we would have an actual application using all the parts of the DBus API. And would leave the current interface intact, maybe for debugging purposes.

So, what do you think?

Alexandre Rosenfeld

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FOG - The Fellowship of the Game
http://www.fog.icmc.usp.br

USP São Carlos - EESC/ICMC  
Engenharia de Computação 06
(Computer Engineering Student)