On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 13:06 -0400, Bryan Clark wrote: > Hey all ~ > > Somewhat tangential issue to what has been discussed, I wanted to share > some of the session / splash screen stuff I was working on a while back. > > In an effort to improve the usefulness of the session I worked on some > ideas for making GNOME be better about always remembering what you were > running. I did this because it seems that session should always be > remembered so that logging in and logging out isn't such a painful thing > to do, i have see people book-marking their web pages to temporary > folders so they could log out/shutdown and be able to return to their > work-flow later. The inherit problem with always remembering what's > running in the session is that something you don't want to the computer > to startup all those apps you were using. Sometimes you just want to > log in and get one thing without having email and the web all starting > up. > > So anyway, I'm sure everyone is looking for mockups, so I made some ;) > > http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/session-start-all-on.png > > http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/session/session-start-with-x.png > > NOTE: These are just idea generating mockups, for us to have a > civilized discourse lets not dive into anything about HIG compliant > padding or stuff like that for now :-) > > My idea is to make the splash screen more interactive. Save all the > apps in your previous session and then on login we show the applications > being loaded, but make the loading interactive. > > Here are some of issues I'd like to discuss: > > You need to allow enough time for people to turn on or off the different > applications that might load into the session. How do we assess this > time? > > Do we keep the splash around while we load all the apps or just until > the desktop is loaded? You can't wait for apps that are blocking on > some kind of I/O so how do we handle this? > > Document based applications, like do we stop the loading of the web > browser all together or allow people to stop loading of certain web > pages? If so, how do we display that? Expand the items are we click > stop for? I think a cleaner approach might be to have g-s-m pop up a "continue after N-seconds if the user doesn't touch it" dialog* with a Sessions list: Last // everything Basic // no user apps (nautilus, panel, metacity, tray-applets only) Custom ---- (saved sessions) That would handle the common cases pretty well (i.e. "start everything I was running" v. "give me a quick `empty' desktop"). The dialog could proceed via a "Next" button-- which would then move a list w/ checkboxes for the "Custom" session (again, run startup after N-seconds if I don't touch anything). Pick what you want and hit "Next", and the session starts. In the future "We Are The Champions" doc-oriented world, documents can simply be appended to that list. IOW, I'm thinking of a "Sessions Assistant" that g-s-m starts with. This has the added benefit of not having to figure out the proper "whack-a-mole" behavior ;-). * Would still require a lockdown key (e.g. "lockdown-session" to force a particular session) even if it's if not optional. -- Peace, Jim Cape http://esco.mine.nu http://ignore-your.tv "If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq Bush press conference last year and shouted, `Bullshit!' it might have made a difference." -- Matt Taibbi, New York Press
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