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

[José Dapena Paz <jdapena igalia com>]

El dom, 20-06-2004 a las 15:19, +0200, Philip Van Hoof escribió:
> Hi there,

> We have of course a dialog box to add a new scheduled task. The dialog
> box of course has a GtkEntry in which the user can type the command that
> will be run per frequency setting.
> 
> Our question is whether or not it's a good idea to make this GtkEntry a
> GtkComboBoxEntry and let the user choose some predefined commands like
> 
> "A virusscanner"
> "Sound an alarm"
> "Start a diskcheck"

>From my point of view, it should be nice the application take a
"document-oriented" vision for the task plans. Think of schedules as
documents where the execution plan is described. If you think as in
OpenOffice or similar, you would have a "File/New", which builds a blank
plan and let you fill it, and maybe a "File/New from template", which
let you choose from a group of templates or wizards a configured task.

These plans should be stored as files, so you can open and edit them
without adding really to the scheduler. Then you should have a window
where you could drop the tasks, and really schedule them

> Since this would be very distribution specific we (in case this is a
> good idea) are planning to put the templates in gconf so that the
> packagers and distributions can put those templates, bound to the
> distribution, there. If that template even has an icon set, we are
> planning to show that icon.

	The way I'm proposing you avoid using gconf for this kind of storage. I
think it's at least strange.

> Note that if somebody of this list wants to checkout the application and
> comment on it's usability issues, that would be great. Our target really
> really is to create a very very usable system schedule maintenance tool.

	Where's it? I have implemented a similar application this Spring, and I
think it could be quite better done :) My app has a class service, which
is similar to your predefined templates, and scheduled tasks (specific
execution plans for those services).

-- 
José Dapena Paz
Computing Engineer
Phone:  +34 981 91 39 91 ext. 15
Fax:    +34 981 91 39 49
mailto:jdapena igalia com
IGALIA, S.L. http://www.igalia.com