Re: Nautilus epiphany integration & file transfers

[John Spray <jcs116 york ac uk>]

On Mo, 2005-06-13 at 12:31 +0200, Raphaël Slinckx wrote:
> Knowing that, for the moment i just send over dbus notifications about
> the download progress, that's quite ugly if you ask, and maybe another
> solution can be used, i need help here.
> 
> We thought about a gnome-vfs backend which would use for exemple
> epiphany:// urls, mozilla writing in a named pipe, and gnomevfs reading
> from it and delivering the data to whoever reads in for example
> epiphany://download-id. Is that possible, i don't know, but it would
> allow a simpler dbus protocol, just telling to nautilus "can you copy
> file from epiphany://download-id to download-destination-folder" and
> making use of standard nautilus mechanisms.

I don't know the details, but it seems to me as if the DBUS solution
would involve less work on the browser end, even if it wasn't as clean.
I would suggest that any system like this is going to have to
(eventually) be made to work with firefox as well as epiphany if it goes
in the mainstream desktop.  As such, whichever option involves less code
on the browser end is more practically attractive, even if inelegant.

> * Concerning file progresses dialogs, is it envisionnable to replace
> them by somthing like in the screenshots ? for all transfers
> (moving/copying from/to any kind of source/destination). This has
> advantages:

I was thinking about this very thing myself, yesterday.  The main thing
that I couldn't figure out was how to handle multiple simultaneous
transfers into the same folder.  One overall progress indicator for all
transfers in the status bar?  It's neat, but it's not as clear as the
dialogs.  Transferring multiple files in parallel is visual through the
use of progress emblems, but this doesn't handle the case of
transferring multiple lists of files in parallel.

By the way, the transfers dialogs still stack on top of each other, is
it some WM problem that means they can't be cascaded?

> * Finally concerning emblems. You notice that the emblem fills up when
> the file is being downloaded. That was a quick hack, cause emblems
> shouldn't be used for that, but here are my ideas about that:

I looked at your video: very cool stuff!  I thought it would be more
clear that the globes indicated a transfer if they were spinning.  This
would be quite distracting, I suppose, but personally I think it's worth
it.

> - For every file transfer (not only download) show something, a progress
> bar, the icon changing from grey to color progressively, a pie filling
> up, on the particular icon representing the file. That way you can have
> a precise feedback for the progress of that file. Maybe using a text
> saying "55% complete", like it is possible now to show the filesize
> under the file name.
I don't think the extra text would fit in a non-zoomed-in view.

> - Provide a context menu item for an "active file" proposing to cancel
> the operation on that file (deleting it would result in the same thing)
Good idea.

> So far here are the problems i see with this approach:
> -How to cancel a whole job ? maybe a cancel button in the statusbar,
> beside the progress bar ?
Here's the question of the multiple file transfers again.  However, this
mostly comes up in the case of file-management tasks rather than
download-type things.  I think for the moment it would be good to
concentrate on the downloading case and handle the questions of file
management later.

> -How to handle the desktop being shown by nautilus, you don't have any
> statusbar ? either fallback on a dialog, or just providing the progress
> "emblems" can be enough, you don't do that much transfer to your desktop
> except single files.
I think the emblems are quite adequate for the desktop, and certainly an
enhancement over the present situation.

> -Should file operation emblem be recursive (ie. a dir being copied could
> show the progress for the entire directory, subdirs only for the content
> of subdirs, etc) ?
Perhaps it should be recursive from the directory being transferred
downwards: otherwise any file transfer would result in the / directory
appearing to be transferring.  But I don't know how easy this recursive
behaviour would be do to.

> My personnal goal would be to have a perfect integration of epiphany
> downloads with nautilus in a nice way, that's why i propose the above
> enhancements, cause i think not only downloads can profit of these.
It is very worthwhile, since browsing the web and downloading files is
such a big part of how a lot of people use their computers.  Don't
forget, though, that many GNOME users are not epiphany users:
particularly big distributions almost all ship with firefox.  Whatever
you do, it has to be easily portable from epiphany from firefox.  Don't
get me wrong: I love epiphany (I use it), but to get a lot of users this
new nautilus functionality has to work with other browsers.

John