Idea for Deskbar

I really like this idea. I have the bad habit of trying to start an application twice if it doesn't load in a few seconds.

I also had thoughts like Polari, of an "Ajax style" loading icon that becomes the app icon. This is also something I could use in the browser (for the windows when they are loading), so I might investigate implementing this.

Of course while this is probably necessary, in general the "Haiku style" would be to have really fast loading applications. I guess the current worst example is BezillaBrowser, which loads slow for all kinds of reasons. If anyone has some other slow loading apps please let me know.

BeOS didn't have a wait cursor, Haiku doesn't either, and in general we want to avoid these sort of kludges from other operating systems.

- Ryan Leavengood, Haiku developer

always have a plan B. The nice thing about this idea is that you actually have information about the loading process instead of an hourglass that screams "I'm locking you up!"

Just a thought. Why not add some Blinkenlights-like feedback per app and per window?

The original idea of Zakalwe: "Haiku could use the application title-bar in the Deskbar to give the user feedback of the loading process.This can be implemented in the various possible appearances of the Deskbar" is absolutely awesome. If only I had thought of that =-)...
MUST implement! MUST. I was blown away when i read the post and saw the animated gif - so cool, functional and integrated... and so much more. MUST! M U S T !

I looked up that "ajax style loading icon" and recognized it as the hip thing of the moment that i have seen in million places from flash player in pc to my iphone. Boring and useless imho, and soon nobody uses it because it USED to be hip.

I still think that progress bar on the Deskbar is excellent idea, something BeOS would have had if it was still actively developed. The issue of 'very difficult for the system to provide an accurate progress bar for something like an application loading' - well, I think it could be programmed so that applications can report status to Deskbar. And the status reported can be chosen by application - when app starts it reports status to Deskbar (OS) as it loads its components (simply numeric values: 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - etc). But why stop there? Maybe apps can report any status on Deskbar - like apps doing some work in the background, downloading something, writing to a CD etc etc. So user can have excellent overview right from the Deskbar. It would be groundbreaking, cool and yet simple. Worthy of haiku. =-)

This is the kind of thinking I like.. Instead of trying to smooth over a problem, try to solve it instead! I suppose large programs could open a window that says "loading" before unpacking data or whatever adds time to startup, but I'm not sure we can count on all developers doing this. There might also be other unexpected delays for example when loading an app over a network disk, and as I think someone else said, providing users with feedback is always a good thing (well unless it gives devs the impression that it's ok to write slow loading apps :))

Well that has been around a while and hasn't become blasé just yet, because it fills a valid need of showing that something is loading when no definite progress bar can be shown. It is also very space efficient, fitting nicely in 16x16 pixels. I don't think they will be going away soon.

Reporting progress for things like downloads or CD burning is one thing, since progress for those is fairly easy to determine. But something like application loading is just not that simple. Some apps might be like Photoshop or the Gimp and they could show progress for loading plugins or whatever, and this could in theory be reported to the Deskbar instead of in a splash screen.

But for something like BezillaBrowser, I don't think it is quite so simple. I think the slow loading is due to loading all kinds of libraries, and certain slow application initialization, and I really don't think Bezilla itself is aware of all that is going on when it is loading. I think the odd combination of both outside the program and inside the program processing would be hard to attach a progress bar too. That is my main argument against this idea.

I re-read my post and it felt hostile. Sorry for that.

Tsteves comment actually proves my point, if I may say so: people like to know what's going on, even to the point where it starts to interfere with the thing they are checking the status for. From christmas gifts as a kid to a health-check as a elderly person - we like to know. I guess it's evolutionary or something...
If I click on a link (shortcut, icon etc) and expect something to happen and in after some time discover that I waited in vain, it for some reason makes me very frustrated - it's weird but that's the way it is (for me at least). If one deals with people every day (like tech-support, that I once did) You know that people always want to know the status of things, even if they actually just get best-estimate that they know can be very inaccurate.

Leavengood, Your point about Bezilla: is it maybe possible for Haiku to have a feature where apps can report THEMSELVES their status to Deskbar. They have a certain startup sequence that they go through and so it can be estimated how much of startup sequence is done. Like: they load the main executable - 25%, they are done loading plugins/extensions - 55%, they get done loading themes - 75%, they're done loading interface - 95%. I obviously don't know how Bezilla loads, but I'm just tryig to demonstrate how in theory it could work. The progress bar wouldn't move very smoothly but that isn't actully an issue, people just like to see some status of things. I don't like the Ajax thing too much beacuse it has no start and finish - it could spin there for 2 seconds or 2 hours. I know progress bar would also be an illusion in a sense that it wouldn't maybe report totally accurately progress (in sense of how much time of loading still remains) but application programmers can roughly still estimate how far in loadng the app is. And user would have something to wait for.
I think Windows XP, Ubuntu (and siblings), BeOS(!) and other OS's all have loading status information displayed on startup.

The problem in Bezilla is that instead of managing to change configuration on the fly when starting, it restarts the whole application, so everytime something is updated it does 1-4 restarts for things like importing profiles, updating libraries and other stupid things. Once a long time ago it could change skins and things on the fly, but I guess it was easier to just restart the whole app. Really crappy programming in other words.

A funny side note to this
While I do like this idea, and I do like the looks of it, the movement etc

It makes me think of a huge Microsoft farce from years ago

If anyone remembers Windows 98, and defrag, scandisk, etc

They made a new feature, where defrag reports what it saw as a time or slowness problem

In other words, you would start defrag, and it would seem like it was taking forever to start, so they made a popup, that would stop the whole process, and say something like

"DEFRAG HAS HAD TO RESTART 10 TIMES BECAUSE OF SOME PROBLEM"
"YOU MIGHT WANT TO STOP SOME OF THE PROGRAMS RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND"
" WOULD YOU LIKE DEFRAG TO KEEP REPORTING THESE PROBLEMS TO YOU"

What was really messed up, was many people would start defrag, and then walk away, thinking they would let it run over night, and come back tomorrow to a fully defragged hard drive

Now, tomorrow when they would return, they would see that stupid screen saying defrag has had to restart 10 times etc etc etc, and it would just be sitting there doing nothing, after doing nothing all night long,,, but if it didnt stop to tell you that stupid message, it would have likely finished up in an hour or so

I'll have to copy that screen some day, and post it here, to remind everyone how stupid nagging and feedback can sometimes be, or get
That in itself is the perfect example for everything bad about Windows, and catering to people that need feedback or interaction, when making it fully automated would have been the right way to go

A "USEFUL stuff" would be applications starting instantaneously.
;-p

Or of course, we can have OSes that load applications on stupidly old computers very fast. BeOS is probably quicker and more useful on a 233MHz PII than Windows is on a 1GHz PIII.

Haiku is such a lean and fast (yet very useful and powerful) that really, loading indicators are almost pointless on many modern systems. The only applications i can think of that are slow to the point of needing a progress indicator are the Qt ports (KOffice as a prime example). Even BeZilla is fast compared to many Windows applications.

IMHO this idea smells like a great idea on paper that won't work very well in practice, even if it looks really cool.

First of all, I would venture to say that more than 90%, if not 99%, of the programs available in Haiku start immediately. The ones that don't are heavyweight applications. KOffice is one of them, but considering the early state of the QT4 port, I don't think that making decisions based on KOffice is a good idea. In short, it's an edge case.

There are many ways to give the user feedback. A "Loading..." window (think Photoshop or many other Windows heavyweights) window is sufficient. A progress bar is even better, but not always practical or even possible for some apps.

From a developer point of view, it's just a glorified progress bar that has been moved from the application to the Deskbar. Progress bars are only useful if there is a quantifiable way for the app to determine how far it has to go before it is completely ready to use. Not all apps can do that. Word comes to mind. Attempting to take something non-specific and guess at quantities can only lead to inaccurate feedback. Anyone remember the copy times in Windows Explorer? I find it sad that it can jump from 1 minute remaining to 13 minutes to less than a minute all in the span of one real minute of time.

An application's loading process is also specific to the application itself. This means that each developer would need to notify the Deskbar of the loading progress, even for really simple applications. This is extra work for every developer for *every* graphical application.

Don't get me wrong. I love it when people come up with new ideas, especially if they think it will really help users work more easily. This one even looks nice. It's just that it would make for far more work than its helpfulness would be worth.

ok, maybe i was a little too enchanted by the mock-up in the beginning. like a kid who decides to only eat gummy bears for the rest of his life... ;P

using this kind of progress bar as default feature for EVERY app loading could be a waste since most of them just load too fast (although, even if it only blinks for a second it would be a nice indicator that an app has finished loading and where it 'parked' itself on the deskbar menu). some huge apps (office, CAD etc) should implement it, to be more user friendly. but it could be up to the developer to decide if he's going to show the progress bar or not and it would be called from the loading app itself. but i still think that having this as a feature is important. i think this thing is going to get implemented in most OS's at some point.

google "windows 7 progress bar in taskbar", first hit already explains it quite nicely.

I don't think that this is important feature.
1) Progress usually implemented in applications individually and only if it needed.
2) Progress information cannot be got by OS, application must update progress manually. Many developers won't implement it.
3) This feature isn't minimalistic.

I could imagine that the notification system, that recently made its first appearance in the trunk, could be used for these kind of things as well. This would have the additional advantage that the user has the deciding power what and how to show stuff (eventually). Plus it's not tied to the Deskbar (or even Tracker), thinking of a special minimal config for a netbook or a kiosk system.

Regards,
Humdinger

There is the initial commit r36949, i don't have any more info on it. Its preferences are in the nightlies, but I don't think it works just yet. Or nothing is using it yet, which makes sense until the API is stable, I guess.

Regards,
Humdinger

That's the idea behind the notification service, how a notification is shown to the user depends on what tool is listening to the service and how it's configured. It may be a pop-up or an area in the deskbar or something else. Maybe even audio only, imagine a subtle clickediclick sound while transfering a file or opening a huge app as progress-meter. Maybe even change pitch with the progress.

Regards,
Humdinger

I for one would like a status bar to see what is going on. For instance rendering a mp3 from wav is not instant.