Re: [Usability] online/offline design

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 5/18/05, Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 18 May 2005, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> > Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 18:47:40 -0400
> > From: Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>
> > To: usability gnome org
> > Subject: [Usability] online/offline design
> >
> > Hey, all-
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone had given thought to designing a standard
> > 'you're not online, so action X could not be completed [configure
> > network][dismiss][cry in shame]' dialog for if/when apps start to poke
> > networkmanger for that information? Or if such a thing would be
> > appropriate?
> 
> Ah welcome laptop user!
> 
> Gets real annoying fast when your Operating System makes all those
> assumptions about having a network connection doesn't it?  As more
> developers get laptops and other types of portable devices and are torn
> away from their always on connectivity I hope they will be as observant as
> you have been.
> 
> There are plenty of things I'd like to have standard dialogs for and this
> seems like another appropriate choice.  However in the long run I think it
> would be more important though to try and make things generally less
> unpleasant for offline users in general.  (The one that gets me most often
> is menu items that look just like other menu items but go and open up a
> web browser and try and connect to a website.)

I was, uh, trying to be a bit less grand in scope :) Obviously it
would be nice to catch some of these things and think through them,
but I'm more concerned with the concrete-and-fixable-RIGHT-NOW issue,
which is 'we have a way to tell if a machine is online/offline, and we
have many apps which should fail gracefully if they are offline. What
should they say when they fail?' So, uh, any suggestions? :)

Luis