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

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 11:16 +0200, Jos�apena Paz wrote:

> >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.

The store which keeps the active scheduled tasks is crontab or at. Which
one is used depends on the record that is showed to the user. There is a
clear distinction between them in both the treeview and the used GUI.
code the decision is abstracted to an abstract class which we call
"schedule". But thats an implementation detail, of course.

The active scheduled tasks should not be stored twice: Once in the
schedule-implementation-system itself (being crontab or at). And once in
a file.

The non-active scheduled tasks is what I am atm calling 'templates'. But
thats just a name which I can change in a glitch, of course.

The templates are at this moment stored in gconf (for as far as
templates are supported, of course). This is also just a simple
implementation detail (and programmatically s coded in such a way that
its very easy and abstracted for the GUI-code to alter this). Since
PyGTK is not supporting the GtkComboBox, however, it's not working on
most distributions (the result is that it's unused atm, it will just
fall in an exception catch and will hide the glade widgets -check the
sources in CVS-).

I don't really understand, however, how 'files' will make it more easy
for the user. Most scheduled tasks will be  or created by the
distributor or by applications who will have gnome-schedule as a
dependency. For example virusscanners could do this to add such a
template to gnome-schedule and inform the user about it. Or backup
desktop software could create a schedule template and set the template
to active.

Unless of course a build-a-template-gui is created. But I fear that this
will make it more sophisticated to create a new scheduled task. It would
ask the user to complete two steps to schedule a non templated task:

* First create a template
* Then set this template active and give it a desired frequency

Which I can again make more simple by introducing a wizard style GUI.

I have something like this in mind:

File->Add new scheduled task

 -> Shows a Window with a template -and frequency picker, an icon and ..
 -> In that template picklist there is an item " Create new template "
   -> Shows a Window to create a new template
   -> Has a GtkEntry in which the user can type the command
   -> Has an icon-picker to select an icon for the template
   -> Has 'again' a frequency picker to select a proposed frequency


Wat do you guys think?


-- 
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