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

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

Hi there,

We are building an application to ease the maintenance of the system
schedule. We have crontab-support working and are building support for
at at this moment.

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"

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.

So a diskscan template would probably be defined like .. in gconf:

Combostring: Run a diskcheck
Command: sudo fsck -a > ~/.fsck.output; gedit ~/.fsck.output
Icon: /usr/share/pixmaps/diskcheck.png

And a alarm template could perhaps even propose a frequency setting:

Proposed frequency: 0 8 * * 1-5
Combostring: Sound an alarm
Command: play /usr/share/sounds/alarm_song.wav
Icon: /usr/share/pixmaps/alarm.png

Or primary target for gnome-schedule is to create an interface that
eases to maintenance of the system-schedule to a level that every sane
desktop user can maintain it. Note that gnome-schedule also translates
the frequency to a human readable format (although there are still some
issues for the translators to support this in their own language).

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.

-- 
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