Re: [Usability] Is this a good idea (gnome-schedule related)

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 17:49 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:

> Well, the idea sounds potentially useful to me, although of course the
> best people to ask would be your users.  What sort of tasks do they want
> to schedule, and what do they currently do instead?

I don't think that lots of users are currently scheduling desktop-tasks
for the simple reason that the desktop is lacking a tool that eases the
maintenance of the system schedule, which is what gnome-schedule is
about to change of course.

I think the most common scheduled task on a Unix like Linux would be to
start an application that performs a backup.

But also scheduled tasks to update something of the users website or to
start an alarm in the morning. Something like that I guess.

Starting a virusscanner and performing a diskcheck is something less
common on 'Linux' I assume. Which of course does not mean that the
desktop does not need a scheduling maintenance tool.

> [ I don't know if you have this already, but something I'd find rather
> more useful (having struggled with the scheduling feature on Windows)
> would be a way to choose an application to run by its menu name rather
> than its binary name... perhaps a bit like the Run Applications dialog,
> except with completion working on both menu names and binary names,
> rather than just binary names.  Although even cooler would be if you
> could just right-click on a program in the Applications menu, and have a
> "Schedule..." item right there :) ]

I like this idea a lot and will investigate whether or not the amount of
work to get something like this is sane enough to implement it at some
point.

It will not be for the first releases of gnome-schedule though.

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org