Submitted by Have you ever had your taskbar filled with 10 applications all doing something that involved waiting for a task to finish? Document Printing Progress, a K3b CD burning dialogue, Audio Encoding via KAudioCreator, File Transfers in Konqueror, Kopete, KTorrent, checking email in KMail… The new Jobs support in KDE 4 will unify the display of progress for these tasks, making it easy to see and manage what is happening on your system. Read on for details.
The Road to KDE 4: Job Progress Reimagined
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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For those not actually reading the article (yes I mean you
The developer knowns about similar projects, for example a GNOME project named Mathusalem, and is interested in developing an interoperable solution once he knows which requirement the KDE side will have.
Again one of the times where one can see how nicely D-Bus allows a service oriented approach on desktop systems.
Preemptive strike on trolls, huh?
Preemptive strike on trolls, huh?
Lets call it an “educational hint”
I see. I stand corrected.
No no, you’re right too. It is an intended side effect
Interesting concept, love to see the final implementation. I will officially support listing this as a must have feature for KDE4.
some of the feature ideas for KDE4 are coming out of the various kde-*.org sites that had sections for posting feature ideas, mock-ups etc for KDE4. Nice for the non-developers out there to see their ideas turned into working code.
but I will continue to bash kde as long as they keep those vertical tabs. I hate turning my head to read them
Yeah, even though English text is written left to right normally, there is no need to put characters on their side when writing from top to bottom. Afterall, all the 26 characters and 10 numbers are taught to be viewed from just one direction.
The following is easy to read:
D <– downwards text with standing characters
O
W – A C R O S S
N
W
A
R
D
S
Are you kidding? That’s much harder to read that if you had turned the letters.
Come on, neither of the two are in any way hard. And it’s not like you’ll be reading a novel that way. It’s a few words.
I get the impression that the tasks and jobs talked about here are the tasks and jobs of the computer. Which is nice and all to keep track of.
What about the users tasks and jobs? Ever since I read the GTD[1] book I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of a desktop fokused on “getting things done” rather than “looking like an office”.
So this is kind of a heads up, if you’re into designing thigs for desktops, take a look at the book and see if there’s soemthing to learn.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
I agree with you. I think a focus on “getting things done” would be nice for any desktop environment (and I believe a lot of environments have already implemented features to do just that).
However, I hated that book you linked to. I realize that the author had about 20 pages worth of stuff to say and a hundred+ pages to fill, but still…
I got about half way through the thing and came to the realization that I didn’t care about the author, his “amusing” anecdotes, or anything else he had to say. I left it on the train for somebody else who may like that sort of thing.
Yeah, after buying the book and CDs, I can say with certainty that I got just as much out of the CDs as I did the book. Still, it’s the bible of time management for many folks. Time Management for System Administrators was a much more relevent book for me – I don’t have a calendar full of meetings, but I do have more to do in a day than I can possibly finish, and have no way to “plan” for the remaining issues that always come up.
Edited 2007-01-24 22:51
While I recoginze that most desktops have “features” to help get things done. The overall design of those features could do better wrt to actual affordances at getting things done.
One shift would be to go from file/window/workspace managing to task/project mangament f.ex.
The computer should really be more your personal secretary rather than your personal desktop mess.
Regarding the book I agree that it could probably be condenced a bit, but really even with the filling it’s only 250 pages
What about the users tasks and jobs?
While this is currently applied to jobs the computer is processing for your, the general design is capable of representing any kind of job.
Basically this is what Rafael has worked on lately, i.e. taking the concept of “jobs” to a new abstraction level.
This looks very sweet. I’m really looking forward to kde4 – I already absolutely love kde, and it looks like it’s just going to keep getting better!
as usual; “can’t wait”.
Looks nice. However, how will it work with regard to file copying? They say it depends on DBUS; I just don’t know how “deep” it is. If I select 100 files in Krusader / Konqueror, and copy it, will it spawn 100 processes? Or will it spawn just one?
In the former case, it will be close to useless. If they can manage this, however, it will rock!
If you select multiple files for copying or moving in Konqueror, it creates one copy job for the whole operation, i.e. copying one file after the other until it is finised.
You can easily check for yourself, because now you only get one progress dialog.
The feature discussed in this article is about allowing different forms of job visualizations, not about changing the way jobs work.
The feature discussed in this article is about allowing different forms of job visualizations, not about changing the way jobs work.
Yes, I understood that much.
I also thought that it is already one job, just needed someone to confirm it.