The line between informative and annoying is thin.
A lot of people find Growl annoying. I for one don't use it for a lot
of things. For example, I prefer Transmit without Growl.
I don't see them being useful, since knowing the status of something
isn't that
useful, just knowing that it either finished or failed is.
I disagree. Take saving a 1GB file in Photoshop. That process can take
anywhere from several minutes to a few seconds. Same with rsync.
What should you do, find the process' average disk writing/uploading
speed and divide the full size of the file(s) by that? C'mon.
The status can be the difference between "this will soon be over,
let's wait some more" and "OK, this will take forever, let's have
lunch".
You may find them useless, but a lot of people don't, hence their
ubiquitousness.
The question is, is Growl the tool for the job?
On Oct 14, 2010, at 8:46 PM, Christopher Forsythe wrote:
That's the thing though, it's the same discussion really. I don't see
them being useful, since knowing the status of something isn't that
useful, just knowing that it either finished or failed is.
I have yet to see a good example, within the context of what Growl
does, where a status bar would be all that useful rather than kind of
annoying information.
It gives me the "are we there yet?" kind of feel, versus the "hey,
we're here" feel that most people actually want.
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Pedro Estarque
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hey Chris,
I think there are two separate discussions here.
- Is it in Growl's goal to display a progress bar?
- Is there any use to a progress bar at all?
The first one is not up to me to decide.
The second, in my opinon, is pretty obvious. If the day ever comes
that we
achieve a real-time computing experience, then progress bars will be
obsolete.
Until then, they are invaluable.
On Oct 14, 2010, at 7:54 PM, Christopher Forsythe wrote:
How is it useful to know the progress of something is happening,
versus just knowing when it's done?
We need to be very clear here that the scope of Growl isn't to be
something that doesn't fit. I don't think progress bars fit. While
it'd be a neat UI trick, I think it's a different place than where
Growl needs to be.
My point here is this. Growl is meant to be very lightweight
notifications, i.e. that you only get notifications on as few things
as possible, while keeping those things very very informative to
you.
Another way to look at it is that Growl should notify you about
things
you can do something about. A notification window that just sits
there
and provides a status of how far along something which would take an
hour to do isn't very useful. A sticky notification for when it's
done
is useful.
I'll comment inline.
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Pedro Estarque <[email protected]
>
wrote:
I have several scripts that would benefit from that.
One, for example, zips my PSDs, makes a thumbnail, creates the
html tags
and
uploads them through ftp.
Each step takes some time, specially uploading, and being able to
flow
the
progress is great.
But can you do anything? Is knowing how far along more useful than
being notified that the whole workflow finished, or that the
workflow
failed at $n step? I would contend that since you cannot do anything
with the progress bar, that it's almost useless for purposes other
than pedantry, but that knowing when the job is completed is much
more
informative.
I use a slightly hacked version of CocoaDialog for the progress
bar to
happen in the background.
I run 2 instances of CocoaDialog simultaneously, one overlapping
the
other,
thus "updating" the bubble. I increased the icon size limit so
that would
fit a bar and changed the plist setting to LSBackgroundOnly so
that it
doesn't change the focus. It kind of works, but it's an ugly
hack. I
think
Growl could do much better.
That is pretty gross.
http://pedro.estarque.com.br/random/CocoaDialogProgressBar.png
Kind of pretty, but notice how you basically aren't doing anything
with
this?
I also have an rsync script that basically warns “Back up
started” and
“Back
up completed”.
I guess I could pop a dialog every 1/10th of the way, but I'd
much rather
be
able display a proper progress bar.
Why would you even need to know about it being 5/10 completed? Are
you
going to all of the sudden going to need to do something when it's
5/10 of the way done?
Chris
On Oct 14, 2010, at 7:00 PM, Christopher Forsythe wrote:
I'll rip it out of growlnotify when I get my laptop situation
resolved.
Why is showing a progress bar useful?
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Pedro Estarque <[email protected]
>
wrote:
Why is this option there then?
IMO, if it doesn't do a thing it shouldn't be there, right?
I don't know what Growl is for or not, but being able to show a
progress
bar
in a bezel like unobtrusive way is a very useful thing.
On Oct 14, 2010, at 6:43 PM, Peter Hosey wrote:
On Oct 14, 2010, at 12:23:17, Pedro wrote:
Hi, does anyone knows how to use this option?
It doesn't work. Growl doesn't support progress indications in
notifications.
I think Ingmar added API for it, but Growl has never actually
supported
it
and it's always been our stance that we will not. Growl is for
telling
you
when things are done (or failed), not when things are not
finished
yet.
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