"Active" pane?

[jazzman22]

I just upgraded from .96.1 to .96.3. What happened to the "Active" and
"Queue" screens under "Downloads"? They're gone now. Am I missing
something?



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[Christian Biere]

jazzman@... wrote:
> I just upgraded from .96.1 to .96.3. What happened to the "Active" and
> "Queue" screens under "Downloads"? They're gone now. Am I missing
> something?

No, downloads are simply displayed using a single pane now. The Gtk+ 1.2
GUI still uses three panes but this will change in the future too.

--
Christian

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[fallingleaf]

Christian Biere wrote:

[e-mail] wrote:
> I just upgraded from .96.1 to .96.3. What happened to the "Active" and
> "Queue" screens under "Downloads"? They're gone now. Am I missing
> something?

No, downloads are simply displayed using a single pane now. The Gtk+ 1.2
GUI still uses three panes but this will change in the future too.

--
Christian

I have to say I am quite disappointed in the decision to change this behavior.  It seems to be a reduction of features in the best P2P client I've found yet.  0.96.1 works well enough for me.   I guess I'll keep using that unless I find something better or the "active" and "queue" panes are put back in.  Who wants to look at a bunch of queued downloads?  I'd rather check progress of ones that are actually downloading.

[uberpinguin]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 21:22 -0700, fallingleaf wrote:

>
>
> Christian Biere wrote:
> >
> > jazzman@... wrote:
> >> I just upgraded from .96.1 to .96.3. What happened to the "Active" and
> >> "Queue" screens under "Downloads"? They're gone now. Am I missing
> >> something?
> >
> > No, downloads are simply displayed using a single pane now. The Gtk+ 1.2
> > GUI still uses three panes but this will change in the future too.
> >
> > --
> > Christian
> >
>
> I have to say I am quite disappointed in the decision to change this
> behavior.  It seems to be a reduction of features in the best P2P client
> I've found yet.  0.96.1 works well enough for me.   I guess I'll keep using
> that unless I find something better or the "active" and "queue" panes are
> put back in.  Who wants to look at a bunch of queued downloads?  I'd rather
> check progress of ones that are actually downloading.

I sort the downloads view by Status, which accomplishes essentially the

same thing.
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[Matthew Lye]

On 9-May-07, at 11:54 AM, Will Keaney wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 21:22 -0700, fallingleaf wrote:
>>
>>
>> Christian Biere wrote:
>>>
>>> jazzman@... wrote:
>>>> I just upgraded from .96.1 to .96.3. What happened to the  
>>>> "Active" and
>>>> "Queue" screens under "Downloads"? They're gone now. Am I missing
>>>> something?
>>>
>>> No, downloads are simply displayed using a single pane now. The  
>>> Gtk+ 1.2
>>> GUI still uses three panes but this will change in the future too.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Christian
>>>
>>
>> I have to say I am quite disappointed in the decision to change this
>> behavior.  It seems to be a reduction of features in the best P2P  
>> client
>> I've found yet.  0.96.1 works well enough for me.   I guess I'll  
>> keep using
>> that unless I find something better or the "active" and "queue"  
>> panes are
>> put back in.  Who wants to look at a bunch of queued downloads?  
>> I'd rather
>> check progress of ones that are actually downloading.
> I sort the downloads view by Status, which accomplishes essentially  
> the
> same thing.

I just twigged (sorry, fallingleaf) to the fact that this was  
intentional program behavior rather than an error.
My feeling is that the main 'Downloads' display is too unwieldy to  
accomplish the same things as one can with the three separate panes.  
I find myself unhappy about this design decision, and am not looking  
forwards to this change in the GTK+ 1.2 branch.  Is there an  
important developmental reason for it?  (I know bits of the engine  
are being extracted from the GUI.)

- Matt


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[Christian Biere]

Matthew Lye wrote:
> I just twigged (sorry, fallingleaf) to the fact that this was  intentional
> program behavior rather than an error.  My feeling is that the main
> 'Downloads' display is too unwieldy to  accomplish the same things as one can
> with the three separate panes.  I find myself unhappy about this design
> decision, and am not looking  forwards to this change in the GTK+ 1.2 branch.
> Is there an  important developmental reason for it?

Pro:

 * Much simpler code.
 * Everything related to downloads can be controlled in one place.
 * It's a "logic" and "intuitive" way to arrange the display.

Contra:

 * Gtk+ 2.x keeps the sorting when the contents change or rows are added
   which obviously is more CPU intensive than a unsorted list.

When a download switches from queued to active or vice-versa, the core removes
it from the GUI and inserts it again. This is rather CPU intensive in the GUI
code. This happens only because the GUI originally had different panes (still
the case with Gtk+ 1.2) for queued and active downloads. It would be better to
not perform this deletion and reinsertion.

Except for the latter, I really prefer the new way to display the downloads.
I'm not really happy with the performance. The sorting should probably not be
persistent or at least that should be optional.  If a node (file) has many
branches (transfers) the performance decreases quickly. I've considered adding
a second list display again which would only show the transfer for the file
under the cursor as we do for download progress meter, the file details and
search result details. This would lower the overhead quite a bit.

I find the old downloads display with 3 different panes odd and quite painful.
Especially if downloads switch between queued and active it's often impossible
to perform the desired action on the download or to see what's going on with a
certain download at all. Yes, you can freeze the queue but that's a horrible
hack.

Basically, if people don't like it this way, I need to know very specific
reasons and not just "I don't like it" because rewriting anything takes more
than five minutes. Specifically, what can you do with the splitted display
that you cannot do with the single display?

--
Christian

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[Matthew Lye]

On 2-Jul-07, at 6:04 PM, Christian Biere wrote:

> I find the old downloads display with 3 different panes odd and  
> quite painful.
> Especially if downloads switch between queued and active it's often  
> impossible
> to perform the desired action on the download or to see what's  
> going on with a
> certain download at all. Yes, you can freeze the queue but that's a  
> horrible
> hack.
>
> Basically, if people don't like it this way, I need to know very  
> specific
> reasons and not just "I don't like it" because rewriting anything  
> takes more
> than five minutes. Specifically, what can you do with the splitted  
> display
> that you cannot do with the single display?

I can appreciate the downsides to the old method that you've  
mentioned.  I'm not enamoured of having separate panels for the sake  
of separate panels.  So far my objection would be based most heavily  
on performance issues.  Dealing with a slow main downloads display,  
especially with on top of the font issues GTK+2 has on Darwin/OS X  
machines (as when I encountered it as the single interface), was  
difficult.  And I'm not sure my machine will perform well if there  
are (again) several thousand entries in a list which is inclusive of  
all the currently 'no source' entries.  The last time that happened  
(in GTK+1.2), re-sorting the list involved a fair bit of patience.  A  
(possibly) fairly simple compromise would be to add three checkbox  
filters so that one could choose whether or not to display the  
active, queued, and dormant entries.

I'll build another GTK+2 version, and look at them side-by-side for a  
while.  Hopefully (you may remember) once I get the contextual (pop-
up) menus working again (something I've done wrong compiling a  
library, I expect).  If there's functionality that would need to be  
brought back up to speed, or can't (as far as l can figure out) be  
replicated, then I'll definitely express a more detailed concern.  
You're right, "I don't like it" is not a very helpful design  
specification.

- Matt



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[Bill Pringlemeir]

On 2 Jul 2007, mlye@... wrote:

> And I'm not sure my machine will perform well if there are (again)
> several thousand entries in a list which is inclusive of all the
> currently 'no source' entries.  The last time that happened (in
> GTK+1.2), re-sorting the list involved a fair bit of patience.  A
> (possibly) fairly simple compromise would be to add three checkbox
> filters so that one could choose whether or not to display the
> active, queued, and dormant entries.

I agree with both of you.  The three panes was not good with source
poping between active and queued.  However, it was easier to locate
dormant entries.  For downloads *with many sources*, I would prune
retries to some lower value than the default to get rid of them.

Some of the values for dormant entries (number of retries, etc) make
sense for a rare file but should be far less for a popular one
especially if there are enough source to download the file in a
reasonable time.  I think that this can be done by looking at an
aggregate download rate and the size of the file.  Ie, based on the
ETA determine what number of sources are needed.

Maybe pruning high retries sources is possible with the new interface.
However, I found that expanding the tree ground my machine to a halt,
so I didn't do this.  Albeit, the previous code wasn't too fast on my
machine either.  However, part of the reason I was pruning some retry
entries was because it reduce CPU usage.  Keeping the tree collapsed
does the same thing.  However, I don't get as much visibility, but at
least there is a mechanism to stop the GUI from consuming all the CPU
now.

A large retry count makes sense for downloads with few sources.  I
have had nodes go offline and return to resume a download.  This is
perfect for files with one or two sources.  It doesn't make so much
sense with 100s of sources.

Also, looking at how GTKG is downloading is somewhat fun/interesting
by itself.  Maybe like opening the hood of a ferrari.  However, it is
not necessary to a successfully downloading.  I suppose the graphic of
the download progress is much the same.

Fwiw,
Bill Pringlemeir.


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[Christian Biere]

Bill Pringlemeir wrote:
> On 2 Jul 2007, mlye@... wrote:
> > And I'm not sure my machine will perform well if there are (again)
> > several thousand entries in a list which is inclusive of all the
> > currently 'no source' entries.  The last time that happened (in
> > GTK+1.2), re-sorting the list involved a fair bit of patience.  A
> > (possibly) fairly simple compromise would be to add three checkbox
> > filters so that one could choose whether or not to display the
> > active, queued, and dormant entries.
 
> I agree with both of you.  The three panes was not good with source
> poping between active and queued.  However, it was easier to locate
> dormant entries.  For downloads *with many sources*, I would prune
> retries to some lower value than the default to get rid of them.

So what do you think about the new downloads interface in SVN (Gtk+ 2.x only
for now)?  I've also published a new SVN snapshot for those who prefer fetching
the tarball.

--
Christian

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[Bill Pringlemeir]

On 31 Jul 2007, christianbiere@... wrote:

> So what do you think about the new downloads interface in SVN (Gtk+
> 2.x only for now)?  I've also published a new SVN snapshot for those
> who prefer fetching the tarball.

Specific to the previous discussion, the downloads now have all of the
features that I use to use.  Generally, it is much nicer.  However, I
have a few points, many of which you are probably planning to address
anyways...

The side-bar is consuming valuable screen real-estate.  However, in the
search screen, seeing all active searches is better than the drop-down
button.  Ie, I think it is not as usable to have to click on the
drop-down button as it is to have a dedicated section of the screen
showing all searches (these could be tabs, or a list box, etc).  The
networks status items are also useful.  However, they might be moved
to the status bar (to take the place of node, files, bytes HSEP info).
Or perhaps the HSEP stuff could be selectable like the other GNET
status info.

I think that the download tabs are much better (positions underneath
away from general navigation) than the statistics tabs.

It takes a little getting use to (retraining your mind).  So I would
expect some comments and/or resistance.  I think if people give it a
chance, the will like it.

fwiw,
Bill Pringlemeir.



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[Christian Biere]

Bill Pringlemeir wrote:
> On 31 Jul 2007, christianbiere@... wrote:
>
> > So what do you think about the new downloads interface in SVN (Gtk+
> > 2.x only for now)?  I've also published a new SVN snapshot for those
> > who prefer fetching the tarball.

> The side-bar is consuming valuable screen real-estate.  However, in the
> search screen, seeing all active searches is better than the drop-down
> button.

I agree that the drop-down menu button is no real alternative to the list in
the sidebar. It's just there as an extra, so that you don't have to use the
list if you don't want to. A plain label would use just as much space, so it's
a win-win unless people consider it irritating.

> Ie, I think it is not as usable to have to click on the
> drop-down button as it is to have a dedicated section of the screen
> showing all searches (these could be tabs, or a list box, etc).

Well, technically it does not really matter whether it's a list or tabs, it
works the same. However, it seems if you don't use tabs at least some people have
difficulty to wrap their minds around the GUI because they are more used
to tabbed GUIs. In case of the "navigator" the tabs are really the better choice,
especially as the navigator wasted a lot of screen space. I don't think "tabs"
are the best solution for everything especially where you have more than about
a dozen items.

Just for the record, you can display the searches list as tabs "right-click ->
Preferences -> Show tabs". Though I don't like that here because you cannot
display more than around 10 searches this way. That's mainly because the tabs
are display horizontally. They could be displayed vertically albeit that's not
going to save any space. It might make it more intuitive than the list is. It's
a bit difficult to make tabs sortable. At least it would be very unintuitive
whereas it's straight-forward with a list.  One workaround of the "too much
tabs" problem could be displaying only certain ones and use sub-tabs e.g., a
page for browse results, one for stopped searches, one for running. Something
like that. Similar to the current downloads display.

You can hide the sidebar by pressing F8 and make it visible again by pressing
F8 again. Obviously I added this because I agree that it takes a lot of screen
space. I'm not really satisfied with the sidebar but I cannot think of a good
alternative. I think it should be globally visible not just in the searches tab
or would you disagree?

> The networks status items are also useful.  However, they might be moved to
> the status bar (to take the place of node, files, bytes HSEP info).  Or
> perhaps the HSEP stuff could be selectable like the other GNET status info.

Now that the navigator is gone, I find the bandwidth meters and such in the
lower box on the right sufficiently small. At least for my display resolution
(1280x1024).

There's not much space left in the status bar. We could add another bar above
it maybe. The question is whether you consider horizontal or vertical space
more valuable. I'd tend to agree that we could replace the HSEP information in
the statusbar with the connection information. Unfortunately, the HSEP stuff
isn't really useful as it's only supported by gtk-gnutella, so the values are
horribly underestimated but some users seemingly take these seriously albeit
they mean virtually nothing. So this could be moved to the statistics tab
instead. Most Gnutella software stopped displaying such information long ago
(on the main screen) anyway (also because the historical way to discover this
information has been broken for years due to PONG caching etc.).

For what it's worth, I moved the icons from the top to the bottom so that the
menubar is completely redundant and can be hidden by pressing F9. This isn't
persisted as I'm a bit worried that someone might accidently hit F9 and never
figure out how to get the menubar back. I'd even prefer to get completely rid
of it, although that might violate some GUI standards. The items could be
accessible through some context-menu but no matter where I put it, it would be
a bit hard to find unless I put them into each context-menu which would rather
suck. Maybe the menu could be put left to the search bar?

> I think that the download tabs are much better (positions underneath
> away from general navigation) than the statistics tabs.

Yes, the two tab rows above each other looked kind of overwhelming and one
could accidently click on the wrong tab.  Having the tabs below might be
somewhat unexpected though but I think it looks good this way.

--
Christian

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