Thanks for the reply Ross, The exact situation on my machine is that I have two optical drives - a DVD and an HP burner. If I try to rip using cdparanoia a CD with some types of copy protection (such as Air's Talkie Walkie), the progress of the rip is different depending on the drive I use.
My DVD will simply slow down to a non-moving crawl (or so it seems). I left it for an hour or so and the progress in cdparanoia showed no change on the command line - well almost no change. If I use the HP burner, it rips, albeit slowly. The entire disk takes an hour or so. A non-protected disk is ripped in my DVD in about 5 minutes usually. So if we remove the individual progress bars, the single progress bar may not have enough fidelity to let me know that I should switch drives to get a faster rip. So you see, the individual track rip progress bars are very handy in some situation. I suppose I should adjust my example then and say that individual progress bars are useful when the user needs to know when in a series of actions a failure occurs, provided the combined progress bar does not have enough fidelity to convey that info? Of course I may be approaching "unique user" status, and can suffer with a stiff upper lip if nobody else thinks my point is valid in any other situations. On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 09:41 +0100, Ross Burton wrote: > On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 21:21 -0700, Kirk Bridger wrote: > > I'm thinking of at least one situation where a single progress bar would > > not be sufficient - when the user needs to know at which point along the > > way something failed during a series of actions. > > > > For example, in Sound-Juicer, while ripping a series of songs, I want to > > be able to see the progress of each song. This way, if there is a > > failure (or a slowdown due to copy protection schemes) I can see exactly > > where along the series of steps the failure occurred. > > > > This could also be covered by having SJ provide this info to the user > > upon failure, but this reduces it to a binary state - working or not. I > > think the granularity of seeing the individual tasks in the series > > should not be removed. > > If there is a *failure* to rip a disk, SJ should move to the next song > bring up a dialogue at the end telling the user what songs failed (I'm > not sure this happens). Ripping speed reducing is a fact of life and > will be ignored, as it could be caused by a scratch, the computer > shaking, or copy protection. > > The irony here is that currently SJ does have two progress bars, but I > plan on removing one of them for G2.12. > > Ross _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
